Gutenprint strives to offer full functionality and the highest possible quality on the printers we support (within the constraints of our available resources), and many people claim that Gutenprint offers better quality than the proprietary drivers supplied by the printer vendors themselves. We have done extensive work on screening algorithms, color generation, and printer feature utilization.
Additionally, Gutenprint provides excellent drivers for many printers that are otherwise unsupported on Mac OS X.
Who is the software's intended audience?
Anyone who needs to print to non-PostScript printers: home users, businesses, photographers, artists. It's part of the basic printing infrastructure on just about any Linux system, and it's also distributed with Macintosh OS X and OpenSolaris.
What are a couple of notable examples of how people are using your software?
As a part of the basic open printing infrastructure, it's mostly one of those things that "just works" and isn't really visible to end users. However, the core is a library with a well-defined API, and there are other projects built around it. A couple of notable ones are PhotoPrint (a free software application for printing photos, with color management and many layout options) and QuadToneRIP (a proprietary application using the Gutenprint core in a GPL-compliant manner). People have been experimenting with Gutenprint in novel ways. Some people are using inkjets to deposit custom "inks" (actually chemical reagents) on specialized media, and need precise control over where the drops are placed. Others are experimenting with color management, in some cases effectively replacing our color transforms and taking advantage of our DeviceN input (accepting the raw ink values for each ink actually used by the printer). These are things that OEM drivers typically don't provide access to.
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