DPI-accurate printing in Linux

19 Mar 2006

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.