This file describes the filters for the EPSON Stylus Color family of printers.
They are all initially based on `epsonlqc-filter.x'. Most of this is completely
untested since I (Dirk Ritter <dirk@gnumatic.de>) only have the original
Stylus Color, so there is no warranty for anything whatsoever!


Choosing the right printer model
--------------------------------
These days there are a whole lot of EPSON Stylus Color printers out there:

	+----------------------------------------------------+
	|  Stylus Color   | Filter name(s)                   |
	+====================================================+
	|original + 'PRO' | StylusColor@360dpi-filter        |
	|                 | StylusColor@720dpi-filter        |
	+----------------------------------------------------+
	|      II         | StylusColor-II-IIs@360dpi-filter |
	|                 | StylusColor-II@720dpi-filter     |
	+----------------------------------------------------+
	|      1500       |*StylusColor-II-IIs@360dpi-filter |
	|                 |*StylusColor-II@720dpi-filter     |
	+----------------------------------------------------+
	|      IIs        | StylusColor-II-IIs@360dpi-filter |
	|                 | StylusColor-IIs@720dpi-filter    |
	+----------------------------------------------------+
	|      500        | StylusColor-500@360dpi-filter    |
	|                 | StylusColor-500@720dpi-filter    |
	+----------------------------------------------------+
	|                 | StylusColor-600@360dpi-filter    |
	|      600        | StylusColor-600@720dpi-filter    |
	|                 | StylusColor-600@1440dpi-filter   |
	+----------------------------------------------------+
	|                 | StylusColor-800@360dpi-filter    |
	|      800        | StylusColor-800@720dpi-filter    |
	|                 | StylusColor-800@1440dpi-filter   |
	+----------------------------------------------------+
	|                 |*StylusColor-800@360dpi-filter    |
	|      1520       |*StylusColor-800@720dpi-filter    |
	|                 | StylusColor-1520@1440dpi-filter  |
	+----------------------------------------------------+

* Filters marked with a star in front of them may or may not be applicable, so
  please do not try them out carelessly.  At least - please do not complain
  too loud about a wrecked printer if you do.

You may wonder if it is worth trying the original model or the 'II' model if
you have a Stylus Color 400.  The short answer is 'no'.  There is no support
for hardware that uses proprietary interfaces among developers of free software
and there would be no interest to support hardware that is as expensive - after
all - you got a printer that has next to no internal data processing abilities
but you paid nearly as much as you would have paid for a 'smart' printer who
does have this important feature.  Enough said.  Buy a real printer.

If you have a Stylus Color Photo series printer you may be aware of the fact
that it uses more colors.  This does not (yet) seem to be supported by Gunther
Hess's driver `uniprint' so you are out of luck.  However, you may still hope
for support to emerge in later versions of `uniprint' since the printers seem
to support ESC/P2.

If you have some other new model that supports ESC/P2 you may try the simple
filter `StylusColor-generic-filter'.  It supports color with 360 dpi but
offers no thrills.  You may at your own risk try to choose an older model that
has similar capabilities, but please consult your printer documentation and the
documentation that ships with GhostScript first - especially `Devices.htm' is
heartily recommended for reading.

Last but not least - `magicfilterconfig' as shipped with Debian let's you
choose the printer and it is recommended that you install all filters that
match your printer.  Just give different names to them such as `360', `720'
and `1440', but always choose the same device, eg. `/dev/lp0'.
You would then issue the command `lpr -P 1440 Letter.ps' if you wanted to
print out some important letter on ink jet paper with special coating and
`lpr -P 360 shopping_list.ps' if you just wanted to get your shopping list
on some piece of cheap recycling paper.


Tweaking GhostScript for fun and profit
---------------------------------------
Originally I tried to keep track of ever changing GhostScript driver options.
If you have the first Stylus Color printer, a Stylus Color Pro, or a
Stylus Color 500 then you may still prefer the good old `stcolor' driver.
However, as Gunther Hess <ghess@elmos.de> ditched the thing in favor of his
`uniprint' driver I use that as well.  Since I expect further option changes
I also took the chance and did weasel out of the option tweaking business.
Surely one could just pass any options to GhostScript like before, but I
consider the `*.upp'-files to be a good thing just because further changes of
options may not break the filters I cooked.  So - feel free to either tweak
the filters or tweak your Unified Printer Parameter files, but do not try
tweaking both at once.
Support for the Portable Document Format is included, but you will need a
recent Aladdin GhostScript version in order to actually get this right.
For the time beeing I would just recommend against it.


Tweaking Magicfilter for fun and profit
---------------------------------------
There is not much you can do here since it already offers ultimate flexibility.
However, if you want new conversion rules like some standard character set
conversion with recode for normal text you definitely should go to the trouble
and do it properly.  Hard-coded paths are surely out of question - edit the
file `./configure.in' instead, run autoconf and make conditional use of the
variables configure spits out.  (Besides - don't forget to update the file
`./filters/filters2.h.in' by running `./filters/mkfilterhin' - otherwise the
newly introduced variables simply would not find their way into the build
environment.)

Character set conversion
------------------------
The Debian folks introduced the feature to preprocess regular text with GNU
recode in order to get extended characters right.  Currently this leads to
the expectation that you feed Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) encoded text to a printer
configured for an IBM code-page 437 (IBM-PC).  You can easily tweak this to
your little heart's content if you change recode's options at the bottom of
the filters or in the middle of the source files.


Thank you for listening.

/bye
Dirk
