CD/DVD printing

[AussieJohn]

I currently have an Epson Stylus Photo R390 Printer which is capable of printing labels directly on to suitable CD and DVD discs.

 

I have no problem printing images on the discs with excellent results. This is done by loading suitable images onto a usb drive formatted with fat32 (will not work with ext3 format on the usb drive), plugging in the usb drive into the Printer and then using the printers on board system to setup the printing process.

 

All the applications I have found have only been for paper printing disc case labels and leaflets etc. None of these are of any use at all.

 

What I am looking for is a Linux application that will enable me design and to prepare an image layout of disc shape complete with desired text and then load it onto the USB drive.

 

If you have any ideas, please speak up.

 

Cheers and thanks in advance. John.

[scarecrow]

Scribus will do easily... but you have to create the template by hand.

I am printing directly from Linux to media, using self-made Scribus templates, and the (commercial) Turboprint driver and a Canon iP5000 printer- with very good results. It may not be as easy as, say, with Surething CD labeler for windows, but the net result is equally good.

Gimp should also do the trick (Openoffice too), but Scribus is much easier to handle for such tasks.

Edited November 19, 2007 by scarecrow

[Greg2]

What I am looking for is a Linux application that will enable me design and to prepare an image layout of disc shape complete with desired text and then load it onto the USB drive.

Have you looked at glabels?

[scarecrow]

Have you looked at glabels?

glabels has ready templates for office labels and a few types of printable sheets, but AFAIK not for CD/DVD media.

Even if it had, the regular cups ppd's do not support printing from the CD tray. Turboprint does, and that's why I'm using it (factly, there's no official Canon driver for Pixma 5000- just a semi-official one at the Japanese Canon site, which hardly works).

[Mitchell]

I'm really interested in this... that's one difficulty I've found switching to Linux. I originally nought our Epson Stylus Photo R210 because as well as great picture printing, I could print on discs directly... while my printer works beautifully, this feature does not... haven't been able to bring myself to try using it under Windows XP in virtual box... Will Turboprint work with my Epson? Where can I find it? I don't mind if it's propriety, though I'd rather not buy it. Unfortunately my printer won't support usb sticks or flash cards, otherwise I'd try what John does...lol. Hadn't thought I'd ever use this feature so I got the cheaper model. Any ideas?

[Mitchell]

Oh easy, just found Turboprint website, and seems my printer is supported... more or less. Doesn't exactly list R210, but lists R200 and R220... surely that's close enough? Any thoughts on setting up Turboprint to print directly to media, and do I need to uninstall cups? Is the paid version much better than the free wversion? Will have a look at the docs... cheers.

Edited November 20, 2007 by Mitchell

[scarecrow]

The free Turboprint version is the same as the licensed one. The only difference is that the free version watermarks the output at high resolutions (I think 300 dpi or more), so you may give it a try- and if it suits your needs, then you can consider buying it. It's not cheap, especially if you have got a basic $ 60 printer, but the license is lifetime.

[AussieJohn]

Sorry fellas but none of your suggestions is an answer to my original request i.e. for an application to create a selected image and enable arranging selected text in arrangement and colours. Being able to curve lines of text to suit a disc (just one example). All the suggestions are about work arounds using bits of this and then that or creating templates and so on. I am also NOT looking for an application that can write this to the printer. There are numerous Windows programs that can do what I am looking for, I know because I have used them in the past to design CD/DVD disc adhesive labels. I have looked into the suggestions to the extent that I have installed the suggested apps and they do NOT do what I am looking for.

 

I think I will install Wine and obtain a suitable Windows oriented program and see how that works.

 

Thanks for your efforts any way thus far.

 

 

 

Cheers. John.

[Guest Sandburger]

I'm not sure if this will help, but I just today got DVD printing working on my HP Photosmart D5360, and it started with finding templates to create a suitable label.

 

I did find info on the structure of a glabels template here: http://glabels.sourceforge.net/doc/templates-2.0/

 

I don't know where I found it, but someone made a CD/DVD template that can be edited for your needs according to the tips at the link above. For example, if you have disks with a smaller open area in the center, change the "hole=" variable to something more appropriate.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Glabels-templates xmlns="http://snaught.com/glabels/2.0/">
 <Template name="DVD DVD" size="Other" width="360pt" height="360pt" description="DVD">
<Label-cd id="0" radius="166.5pt" hole="58.5pt" waste="9pt">
  <Markup-margin size="9pt"/>
  <Layout nx="1" ny="1" x0="9pt" y0="9pt" dx="351pt" dy="351pt"/>
</Label-cd>
 </Template>
</Glabels-templates>

The result was not lined up properly on my printer, and I never quite got the adjustments just right. I hope others have better results.

 

I did have success today using Gimp along the lines described in the third post from the bottom at http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-180580.html

Specifically, I used the suggested Gimp script to create the label, and there's also a CD mask to get a printable area from a larger image. Then I had to tweak my print settings to get it centered just right on my printer. By trial and error, and wasting quite a few printable disks, I found that these measurements worked best for my printer:

Page size = 127 x 127 mm

Image size = 116 mm

Top margin = 1 mm

Left margin = 4 mm

There's a bit of overprinting that could be eliminated by reducing image size and readjusting the margins to keep it centered, but I'd rather not waste any more ink and DVDs.

 

Hope this is helpful, if it translates to other printers.