Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, George Hartzell 
<hartzell@k...> wrote:
> Roger L Sopher writes:
>  > My increasingly senile brain started kicking in (or at least sputtered a
>  > bit)  last night and it struck me that FreeBSD rather than linux might be a
>  > better way to go in setting up a printer box using Roy's Quad.  Since he
>  > developed Quad for OS X, which I believe is a GUI on top of Unix, and
>  > requires a version of BSD to be loaded in order for Quad to run, could one
>  > use the FreeBSD version of unix to do much the same thing, perhaps without
>  > as much of the conversion that Linux might require?
>  > 
>  > Do any Unix gurus have an opinion?
>  > 
>  > Somewhere in my box of discarded stuff is a copy of Free BSD and I think I
>  > might give it a whirl.
> 
> I'm a FreeBSD bigot, and am planning to work on just this thing when I
> get back from my current road trip (mid-august).
> 
> I don't think that FreeBSD will be easier "because OS X includes large
> parts of FreeBSD", since Apple put all kinds of Mac-ish/Next-ish stuff
> into the mix which Roy seems to take advantage of (e.g. printcenter
> stuff).
> 
> I'm also not sure that it's going to be clear how to get all of the
> nice options (e.g. choose this curve or that curve, or ...) to show up
> from the print server....
> 
> I do think that it's easier to get a clean build of the various weird
> peices (e.g. cups, gimp, gimp-print) under freebsd than linux.  And
> yes, I believe that even though much of that stuff is being created on
> various flavors of linux.  The "flavor" problem and version-itis makes
> things difficult, and the FreeBSD ports system makes it straight
> forward to pull it all together.
> 
> g.

It's great to see interest in making QuadToneRIP work on Intel based
machines.  There are quite a few flavors of OS'es that have potential
for this.

Maybe I can help with what's dependent on what to make this all work.
I did all the work on Mac OS X so there are some direct ties to that.
They tend to be the most visible since that's the GUI and what the user
sees.  The guts however are very generic Unix -- there are C-programs
and shell scripts.

There is one major dependency -- CUPS.  This is what connects the
whole printing system together.  During printing, Cups is what starts
the QuadTone programs which are Cups Print Filters.  The QuadTone
Cups filter also contains the gimp-print code to actually drive the
printers.  QTR has all that source code included in the distribution
so you done need a separate gimp-print port.

The curve generation scripts and programs are just ordinary programs
that you can execute from the shell.  With OS X I put together a few
double-clickable routines and you can drag files as opposed to typing
shell commands but that is all extra.

PrintCenter and the Print dialogs are certainly OS X specific.  I haven't
modified either of these programs.  They both run off of PPD (Printer
Descriptor) Files that I provide that have all the hooks into QuadToneRIP.
I do know that the CUPS brower interface shows all the QuadTone
options since they are in the PPD file.  There must be some
comparable way in Linux and/or FreeBSD to setup printers and print
using selectable options.  As long as it uses and honors all the info
in the PPD file, I would think it would work very similarly.

Hope this helps.
Roy