GimpLabels: Printer fudge factor (Shallow Thoughts)

GimpLabels: Printer fudge factor

I ran out of business cards (where do they go? I never seem to find occasion to give any out. They make good bookmarks, though) and wanted to print some more. I use gLabels for low-res label printing, but it prints poorly (or used to, anyway) so when I want something with crisp and sharp images, I use GIMP with my GIMP Labels script.

That's all fine, except that the "make label page" part of the script scales the labels to fit on a typical Avery letter-sized template -- and the Gutenprint drivers for my printer can't actually fill a letter sized page. (I have the choice of normal printing, in which it fills about 97% of the page, or Borderless printing, where it slops way over the edges.)

The solution is to crop a little extra off the outside edge of the label page. So I added some code to script-fu-rect-label-page to keep a "Printer fudge factor" and crop the page at the end. An easy tweak which seems to work fine, and with any luck it'll cure a lot of the misalignment problems I've seen with labels.

While I was making changes anyway, I added some clearer installation instructions for the 95% case of someone who just wants the script with the labels I've included, since I recently heard from someone who wasn't clear on where to install the script.

Tags: gimp
[ 13:03 Oct 21, 2007    More gimp | permalink to this entry | ]