gLabels Version 1.92.0

gLabels Version 1.92.0

Posted Sep 28, 2003 0:58 UTC (Sun) by smeg4brains (subscriber, #207)
Parent article: gLabels Version 1.92.0

I've used gLabels for a while, and while it's a great program, there is only one issue that's caused me a lot of grief.

If you include an image file that has transparency in it, you're nice high quality printout, will come out looking more like crayola scribblings.

The problem is not actually a problem in gLabels, but a problem with the gnome printing system. Currently it has no elegant way of dealing with transparencies in images. It ends up just merging the images together at some random dpi (actually I think it's a fixed dpi.. something like 75). It does this because it uses postscript for it's internal communication or something (I really don't know the details), and postscript doesn't have any idea what transparency is.. Postscript is, after all, supposed to be used for talking directly to your printer, in which case transparent and white are pretty much exactly the same thing.

This is a pretty major problem, that AFAIK has not been resolved by anyone, and might not even have a resolution in the works. Something's got to be done, even if it means "embracing and extending" the postscript used by the gnome print system to allow things to be handled properly. This is one of those minor little clean-up's that needs to be done if linux is going to be taken seriously (or gnome at least) on the desktop.

Of course, I still use gLabels all the time. I just merge pictures with transparencies in gimp and then flatten them out before I put them in gLabels.

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