Here are some further notes and resources on printing in Linux.

Personal comments and things to do

With the printers I am using at present, I have not figured out how to print continuous tone color images nicely. My default printer, EpsonStcAny36, does a passable job, but the colors seem to have some black in them and turn out rather dark. My Epson760_36 printer does a great job on continuous-tone, grey-scale images, but a poor job on continuous-tone color images. Parts of the colors do not get printed at all. Perhaps this will require some tweaking of the printer description file.

Another thing on my to-do list is the printing of web pages. It seems this is an area where Windows has the edge over Linux. Opera in Amigo does not do a very good job printing even just the formatted text in a web page, let alone the images. I don't know about other browsers, and possibly working in a different desktop environment. But then again, I am after a minimal but usable solution that does not require installing huge libraries such as Perl or Java. So far, that solution is to save the web page, load it in the lynx browser, and print it out as text. If I really need an image, I save and print that separately as well.

Resources on printing from a Linux desktop

• Linuxprinting.org
  Linuxprinting.org is a vast general resource where you can find anything on printing in Linux, including information on different printing systems, supported printers, etc.
  There are also some pdq pages at Linuxprinting.org, but I found those somewhat complicated. Their description of pdq includes using yet another piece of software called Foomatic, and different kinds of drivers. Foomatic requires that one have Perl installed.



• Another resource on all aspects of printing in Linux
  http://www.linux.se/doc/HOWTO/Printing-HOWTO/doc-index.html



• General tutorials on Linux printing
  http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/210/1/
  http://www.marcelgagne.com/LSAbook/lsach13.pdf

© C. Steinbrüchel (2005)