http://norman.walsh.name/2006/09/23/printing 9 89 2006-09-23T16:02:48-04:00 $Date: 2006-09-24 09:37:31 -0400 (Sun, 24 Sep 2006) $ Norman Walsh 2006 Norman Walsh When we bought a high-end photo printer, I resigned myself to running a Windows box to drive it. Troubles with VMWare pushed me to investigate more closely and I was delighted to find a Linux solution: TurboPrint. The back story to this essay is that we bought a Canon i9900 printer (kudos to Canon for reasonable looking, and hopefully persistent, URIs). What I realized is that while I get a lot of enjoyment out of our pictures online, Deb Walsh and others would sometimes enjoy them more if they were presented more traditionally. So I dug around a bit on the net, got some advice from Lauren Wood (who had already picked the i9900), and eventually choose the i9900 too. There's no question, it makes wonderful prints. I mean seriously, knock your socks off, wonderful prints. But a quick look at Linux Printing.org support for Canon printers pretty clearly excludes the i9900. I knew that going in and fully expected to have to run a Windows box to drive it. But I don't have a license for another Windows box, so I thought maybe I could drive it from VMWare. I got all the Canon drivers installed without any trouble, plugged the printer into my laptop, connected the device to my VMWare session, and printed. Can you say BSOD? I knew you could. (I could, I probably should, spend some time reporting that bug, but I haven't bothered yet). While searching for answers to that BSOD problem, I stumbled across TurboPrint. TurboPrint for Linux is a set of commercial printer drivers that includes support for the i9900 and a host of other high-end printers. They integrate with CUPS and LPR/LPRng and work like a charm. For a quite reasonable 29.95€, I have a working set of drivers that do everything, right up to the i9900's spectacular 13x19" “A3+ borderless” size. And let's just be clear: photos look good at that size. Now my dilemma is that if I'm going to print them, and clearly I am, I'm going to want even better control over the images. Anyone know of a good “digital photo editing” book for GIMP users? (I can probably learn to do the mental gymnastics of conversion from one of the Adobe programs if necessary, but if I don't have to do that before I really understand the difference between contrast masks and colorspaces, all the better.)