[cups.general] Color Webpage Printout on Black and White Printer Too Bright

[Helge Blischke]

Rainer Dorsch wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I have a black and white HP Laserjet 6P and when I print colored webpages
> they are "translated" (dithered?) into black and white printouts, which is
> perfectly ok and expected. What is unexpected though is that for me most
> pages print by far too bright and are not readable at all.
> 
> I am wondering if I could "hook" a gimp script into the printout chain
> which does a processing which improves he printout quality for color pages
> on the printer.
> 
> It would also be perfectly acceptable for me, if I can define a second
> printer in CUPS where the user sees a print preview and has a slide bar to
> adjust the brightness of the printout (or if there are more then one
> dimension two or three slide bars would be fine).
> 
> Does anybody know if hplip has a solution for this specific problem?
> 
> I appreciate any suggestion which addresses this problem in the ways I
> scetched above or in completely different ways.
> 
> Thank you
> Rainer

You could try to write a filtr script that calls gimp with the appropriate 
options. But be aware that it probably is necessary to implement the filter 
as a client to a daemon (preferably managed by xinetd) as gimp needs a GUI 
for what you intend to do, and the user lp (or what it is named) the cups 
filters run as in general do not habe the previleges to access the X server 
(or the display service on Mac OS X).

Or you could write a backend script that launches gimp (in a similar way as 
described above) and then print from the gimp after mainpulating the image.

Helge