For the most part all of you are right.
On Windows there is just one product -- QTR -- B&W printing from QTRgui layout to
the Epson printer. It's all one piece and can't be separated. There is No Color Mngt at all.
There is an issue about maintaining the QTRgui frontend -- I didn't write it so I have no
way to change anything. It works with no trouble on Windows XP & 7 as far as I know.
It fully supports all the 8 ink printers. Its the 10 ink printers that have limited support.
Printing works fine with them, but Curve Creation can't access the other 2 inks. If you
get 10 ink curves from someone else, the printing works just fine with all 10 inks.
The driver internals and actually the Curve create internals have all 10 inks. If you edit
the .qidf with NotePad and drop them onto quadprofile.exe you can create 10 ink curves
but yes its different and a bit more hassle. I'm trying to figure out a way to continue
to fully maintain a product on Windows but so far its not clear how to accomplish this.
The virtualization idea is a good idea, in fact that's how I've done a lot of the Windows
work for years on my Mac.
On Mac there are now two separate products. The long time QTR driver runs as an
ordinary print driver in the OS. Its just a specialized print driver for B&W output.
You can print with any program you like -- naturally Photoshop has been the usual.
Recently (actually almost a year ago) I introduced a new program for high level image layout.
I've used the name QTR-Print-Tool but to be less confusing I'm dropping the QTR part
of the name. Print-Tool is somewhat like the QTRgui frontend but its capabilities are
a lot closer to something like Qimage. Print-Tool and QTR are completely independent,
so you can do Photoshop to QTR driver, Print-Tool to QTR driver, or Print-Tool to Epson
driver.
------------------------
A little comment about color management (CM). CM is mostly thought of for printing
color but the ICC standard has always included a grayscale format that can control the
lightness/darkness tonality -- essentially like a grayscale Photoshop Curve. Hardly
anybody cared about this so it was not supported much. QTR added some tools for
creating grayscale ICCs way back. They were a bit harder to use on Windows but on the
Mac it all worked just like color profiles. It all worked beautifully until CS4 -- yes a long
time ago. Due to a lot of internal changes like 64-bit programs, the grayscale CM
stopped working when printing from Photoshop to QTR driver. I spent a lot of time
with Apple and Adobe to have them fix this but no such luck. In fact later on they even
made it hard on the color people by dropping No Color Management from Photoshop.
So you couldn't print the color targets for making custom ICC profiles.
All this led to me writing Print-Tool -- first as a CM fix and then as a general easy to use
layout program.
Hope all this helps and thanks to all you QTR supporters.
Best,
Roy
On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 10:13 AM, Mike Finley <mike.finley@...> wrote:
Qimage can create a file that can be printed with the qtrgui program; as far as I know it can't print directly to any printer driver other than to standard Windows printer drivers (provided by either epson or microsoft), and the windows printer drivers don't know anything about QTR curves. The qtrgui program is no longer being maintained, does not support the latest (8 colour) epson printers, and is reported to have some problems with Windows 8. (Qtrgui, as I understand it, bypasses the Windows printer driver and uses an embedded gutenprint driver - the printing code at the core of the Mac OS)
On 11/11/2013 16:02, Ernst Dinkla wrote:
On 11/11/2013 12:58 PM, Mike Finley wrote:...
> What's the 'QTR print driver' - I seem to have missed that one?
>;
For Windows there are many alternatives for that job as long as you do
not use an Adobe program. Qimage (Ultimate) is one of them. Picture
Window Pro can do it too I guess.
agreed
Quadtone Rip can not be used at all for color printing including target
printing in color for color profiles.
--
Met vriendelijke groet, Ernst Dinkla
Roy Harrington
roy@harrington.com
www.harrington.com