The eas­i­est way for me (see­ing as it’s too hard to get the GIMP work­ing with print dri­vers… not that I’ve par­tic­u­larly tried, but not-out-of-the-box isn’t good enough!) is sim­ply to cre­ate art­work as per usual meth­ods, exporting/saving as a PNG (because it’s loss­less, and JPEGs aren’t accept­able whilst any pre­tense of qual­ity exists) at 300dpi (or what­ever DPI, but 300 is usu­ally what I’ll be work­ing in for print), then import­ing into OpenOffice.org 2.0’s Draw. This, of course, is very focussed on deliv­er­ing a great user expe­ri­ence — print­ing works flaw­lessly. The only warn­ing I have is that if it says “out­side printer mar­gins” then select “crop” rather than scale to fit… oth­er­wise, obvi­ously, your DPI/dimensions cal­cu­lated image will go out the window.

You can also export to PDF from here, but that’s bor­ing. Same caveat applies when print­ing PDFs, by the way. I think Acro­bat defaults to scal­ing, and I imag­ine evince, et al., would also… pos­si­bly not. Alter­na­tively, find a Win­dows PC with Irfan­view on it, which is excel­lent for these kinds of things.

This post, of course, avoids the pos­si­bil­ity of Pho­to­shop and oth­ers of its kind for a rea­son. If you can afford it, you should know how to use it to print…

This brought to you by the hurriedly-assembled long-overdue Matthias Car­ols copy I promised some­one at church ages back. Actu­ally, I only did the cover as a way of apol­ogy for it tak­ing me so long ;-) Shrug.