My first post: A question about printing

[marekc]

Hi Everyone,

This is my first post to the Pixinsight Forum. I've been using PI for a few months now, and I'm enjoying the challenge of trying to get the most out of my data!

I'm fairly new to astro-imaging, I'm still not sure that I've made anything yet that's worth showing to the world... but hopefully soon!

I live in the San Francisco Bay area of the U.S., so naturally I've been greatly inspired by RBA, and the other talented and diligent imagers in this part of the world.

My equipment is fairly rudimentary, it's basically all from `Orion', the U.S. importer of astronomy gear. I'm using their `ED80' f/7.5 refractor, their Parsec 8300 monochrome camera, and their LRGB filters. I'm running Pixinsight 32-bit on a MacBook Pro using Mac OS X 10.6 (`Snow Leopard'). I just calibrated this laptop's display with a DataColor Spyder 3 Pro colorimeter.

My first question for the forum is related to *printing*. Although I don't feel like I've made any world-beating images yet, I thought I'd try printing a few images in small sizes. I'm using an Epson Stylus C88+ printer - it's a rather basic small desktop printer, the kind that they give away at the Apple Store when you buy a computer.

Here's my problem: When I try to print from PI, the Processing Console says:

Adobe PDF 9.0
Sending data to printer...
<* failed *>

I also get a pop-up window that says `Unexpected error during printer initialization'.

I am able to print with this printer using Photoshop CS4, Acrobat CS4 (=9.4.1), and other applications, like my LaTeX front end (TeXShop), OpenOffice, and TextEdit.

I was wondering if anyone else has encountered a `printer initialization' error like this?

I suppose it's to early to ask this next question, but... if it ends up not being possible to use this printer with PI, I wonder what would be the best workflow for producing a file in PI, and then opening in PS and printing from there? I suppose that's best left as a case of `we'll cross that bridge when we come to it'.

Thanks for the great software and for the very helpful forum!

- Marek Cichanski
San Francisco Bay area, U.S.A.

[Philip de Louraille]

I never tried to print something before (from PI) but I just did and I had no printing problems. I have a Xerox Phaser 8560 DN printer.
With the current printer settings, will your print fit in one page for your printer, or multiple pages?
Have you tried to print to a file (pdf) and then used Preview to print that?

[harist]

I think it's best to save your final images in a jpeg or tif format from within PI and then use whatever s/w suits you best for printing.

Best,
Tasos

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Marek,

Welcome to PixInsight Forum.

Adobe PDF 9.0
Sending data to printer...
<* failed *>

This is telling that you aren't printing to your printer directly. For some reason, your printer is being "replaced" by "Adobe PDF 9.0", or at least that's what seems from that console output. I've never seen something similar before.

PixInsight's printing feature is still experimental on Mac OS X. It works (except the case you've posted here, obviously), but color management is not handled properly yet. AFAIK, printing works perfectly on FreeBSD and Linux (through CUPS) and Windows. The advantage of printing with PixInsight is in its superior image interpolation algorithms and color management routines (not on Mac OS X), which tend to produce better printed output than other applications.

As for preparing images to be printed with other applications, you can just save them in TIFF format, which virtually all imaging applications are able to open correctly. Before saving for printing, create a duplicate of your original and convert it to the 8-bit integer format with the SampleFormat tool, for the sake of compatibility. If you are using a custom RGB working space for color management (that is, a specific ICC profile for your monitor), then don't forget to embed it in your images, or the other application won't know how to interpret them.

[marekc]

Hi Everybody,

Thank you very much for your replies! It sounds like the printing capabilities in OS X will be dealt with in the future - I'll keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, I'll follow Juan's suggestions for saving as a TIFF and printing from PS. Since I'm using a fairly inexpensive, low-end printer, and I'm not printing very many images, I think this will be fine. I'm not sure when I'll get a `good' printer, so I can certainly wait to see how the printing routines get incorporated into the OS X version of PI.

Cheers,

- Marek Cichanski