On Fri, Aug 7, 2026 at 5:35 PM Jim Hall <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'm starting to work on a FreeDOS program to simulate a dot matrix > printer, to show the output of each page in SVGA mode. (Also > considering adding PC spkr support, so it makes noises as it > "prints.") The first version will be a plain ASCII (7-bit) 9-pin > printer. I'll add CP437 and ESC/P support in later versions. > > Here's what I'm planning: > [..]
My challenge right now is how to generate good-looking letter forms. I'm not going to worry about this too much right now; I'm saving the 5x8 forms in a "firmware" file, which means I can change the look by loading a different "firmware." One easy way to build a "firmware" is to use _setcharsize() to set a vector font size that gets used by _grtext(). Those are Open Watcom C functions. Then I can print each character to the screen, and read the screen to get the pixel values. Uppercase letters look okay at 5x8 size; lowercase letters are terrible. But I might write a program to automatically try different sizes in an attempt to "scale" the letters (like, adjust the width) so lowercase letters will fit nicely in a 5x8 grid. I'll try that next. I might also try doing this in TurboC/C++. But I'd prefer to use an open source compiler. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
