cups gimp-print ghostscript 8.14

[Anonymous]

I am hoping that Easy SW will someday upgrade ESPGS, since it is pretty aged nowdays. I found a way to hack around ghostscript v8.14 into compiling with the espgs gdevstp driver (which didn't compile under gs8.14, failed with some error about previous declaration of stp_map_16m_rgb_color)

Getting cups 1.1.20, gimp-print 4.2.7 and ghostscript 8.14 to compile was quite a challenge! Maybe this can be a mini-howto, at least how I got it to work, being a non-programmer!

When upgrading cups, gimp-print and/or ghostscript, it's necessary to copy the pstoraster/ directory from cups src (read the docs included) and also the stuff from gimp-print/src/ghost (there's a readme in there too) and put those both into ghostscript-8.xx's directory as instructed in the docs. Compile cups and gimp-print as instructed, install.

Since I am not a programmer, my fix for ghostscript 8.14, which was failing to compile gdevstp, was to get the last version of espgs 7.07.1, configure/compile that, then copy the compiled gdevstp.o file into ghostscript-8.14's src directory and compile gs814 as usual. This worked for me, I am guessing there is some subtle difference in the makefiles which makes gs814 fail to compile gdevstp. Anyhow, copying the gdevstp.o file from espgs works to get gs814 compiled with this module.

I'm not sure exactly *why* cups and gimp-print were not working without it. My understanding was that they both have a native cups driver, and also ijs drivers, which should have worked. The cups driver and ijs were compiled into gs814, but I kept getting errors from cups until I got the stp driver working into gs814. The error being logged pointed to rastertoprinter (which is part of gimp-print, and debugging these things is really difficult) but somehow I tracked the error back to gs814 (can't remember all the steps I've been through now, it's been 2 days of struggle :P)

Anyway, EasySW please release an updated/fixed version of gs814 or something?

Hope this helps someone else with the same problems..