Gutenprint is supposed to have been ported to Windows, but installing it and getting it up and running properly is not easy. XSane is even more complicated because SANE itself doesn’t currently run smoothly under Windows. Windows users can access SANE through a SANE GNU/Linux server, but doing so requires at least two computers on a local network, and one of them must be a GNU/Linux server running SANE. If you have a Linux server running SANE, you might as well bypass the Windows machine and print from the server.
If you’re using a Windows machine, generally you must use the scanning software provided with your device. The features are similar to those of the XSane dialogs—just organized in a different way. Proprietary scanning software can be unintuitive and make scanning several images in sequence unduly complicated. For example, the scanning resolution may be hidden in a menu and not immediately visible in the main menu.
As Gutenprint is not readily available in Windows, GIMP’s default printing capabilities are slightly different on Windows machines. When you select Image: File > Print, a dialog with only two tabs opens. In the first tab, you select the printer in a way similar to GNU/Linux. The second tab is the IMAGE SETTINGS tab, identical to Figure 19-44.
In order to finely tune the printing parameters, click PREFERENCES in the first tab. You get a dialog with several tabs, specific to your printer. This dialog is intended for text documents and does not have many image-specific capabilities.