The Developer's Guide to Gutenprint
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# Preface

Gutenprint is the print facility of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). It is in addition a suite of drivers that may be used with common UNIX spooling systems using Ghostscript or CUPS. These drivers provide printing quality for Linux, MacOS X and UNIX on a par with proprietary vendor-supplied drivers in many cases, and can be used for many of the most demanding printing tasks, especially for high quality printing on modern inkjets, including “photographic quality” models which offer very high resolutions and several inks. The core of Gutenprint is a shared library (libgutenprint) which may be used by any program that wishes to produce high-quality printed output.

This manual documents the use of the Gutenprint package, focusing mainly on the libgutenprint library that is the core of Gutenprint. Parts of the manual which describe the use of libgutenprint are aimed primarily at programmers, and do assume that the reader is familiar with C programming, and using standard programming tools on GNU or UNIX systems.

For the end-user, there is a separate manual documenting programs that come with Gutenprint, including the GIMP print plugin, and the CUPS and Ghostscript drivers.

To learn how to use libgutenprint in your own programs is to look at the source of the testpattern, located in `src/testpattern`, as well as the source of the other programs that use libgutenprint, and libgutenprint itself. Most importantly, please consult the API reference and libgutenprint headers.

The manual is split into several parts for the programmer. It starts with a simple usage example of how to link a program with libgutenprint, then how to integrate this into package build scripts, using make, autoconf and automake. The appendices cover the detail of the inner workings of some parts of libgutenprint.

The following sections detail the dither and weave algorithms used in libgutenprint, the ESC/P2 printer control language used in Epson printers and how to add support for a new printer to libgutenprint.

We hope you enjoy using Gutenprint!
—The Gutenprint project

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