This is not earth-shattering but it is confusing and, well, more than a little annoying. I'm working with two systems (mine and somebody else's) trying to print photographs -- trying is the right word, too. Both boxes are Slackware 13.0, both printers are H-P Photosmarts (a 3210 and a C4680), both systems have the latest and greatest HPLIP and CUPS software installed and both print everything else just fine. Photographs? Well, nuts: can't figure out how to get an image printed on standard 4x6 stock (meaning: fit or fill the image to the stock). Been fiddling with HPLIP settings, CUPS settings, fooling around with GIMP, twiddling everything I can come up with and there is no joy in Mudville to be had. About as close as I've gotten to, you know, a printed photograph that looks like a printed photograph is supposed to look is setting HPLIP options then printing with lp file.jpg but that doesn't actually work all that well.

Any hints or tricks I may have missed?

I've had very good luck with the Gutenprint drivers. I use Epson for photos, but I would assume that Gutenprint would also work well with HP.

In many ways the Gutenprint drivers are better that the ones from Epson.

At least on Arch, you have to install the Gutenprint package separately---i.e. it does not come with CUPS.

Gutenprint is provided with Gimp AFAIK.

Yup, Gutenprint is provided with GIMP but... no drivers for HP Photosmart C4680 (or 3210, for that matter). And no PPD files that I can find either.

So, phooey.

Thanks for the input.

Usually it very much depends on the application used
for the print out. And the available driver for that
particular printer.
The example is from "Gwenview", where all kind
of settings are available.

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Have you tried setting the default paper to your print stock in CUPS and then restarting CUPS?
This is the trick to get photo printing working correctly on my Brother printer.

Have you checked here?
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/colla...s/openprinting

Quick check of Brother website suggests that they do not have any true Photo-Quality printers. The definition I use is that there are at least 6 ink colors. To be sure, many 4-color printers can produce very useable prints, but they are no match for the Photo printers with 6+ colors---Epson, Canon, HP Photosmart being the most popular.

This aside, the best overall Linux support is something like this:
#1: HP
#2: Epson
#3: "everyone else"--eg Canon and Lexmark are starting to play, Brother and Samsung have had some Linux support for a while.

Yup, checked openprinting and Gutenprint and other sources (no support for the HP models I'm dealing with, alas).

I will try the CUPS trick and see what happens with that, though -- sounds like a nice kludge and, if it works, problem solved for the moment. I can plug the camera memory into the printer and it does just fine but it would be nice to be able to actually print a photo directly from Linux...

Thanks all for the advice.

that's not really relevant to page size though ...

Call HP.......
They officially support Linux, so there's a reasonable chance someone will know something.

(Have you looked on the HP website?)

nvm

After much ado, I finally found an article -- took some digging -- How to Print FullBleed or "edge-to-edge" Printing at HP's HPLIP web site (http://hplipopensource.com/node/325) that explains how to... well, print edge-to-edge.

btw, wtf nvm.

All is well that ends.