On 20 Apr 2021 at 16:59, Thomas Desi wrote: > Regarding printing I think there are two basic concepts: > Using fonts from the printer (I call this "generic", but maybe this > is my private lingo) or using graphics from the computer. > As I am only interested in printing out pure text (A-Z, 1-0 :) I > wonder if you attempt to print out graphics or some special fonts > or so? Might make a difference, too?
Built-in fonts are obviously an option, there's always some plain ASCII built in, and I believe in the old DOS era there used to be... programs that you ran before printing your jobs, that would pre-upload font sets or national character sets into the printer, so that your print jobs could then refer to those fonts and produce the desired output on paper. Epson dot matrix printers (ESC*P language) were perfectly willing to print individual characters, a line at a time I guess. They were (are) line printers and the ESC*P "language" is little more than an "extension" of raw ASCII + control characters (CR, LF, FF etc) by "escape sequences on top" - for switching fonts and maybe more complex tasks. I mean to say that if you copy a flat ASCII File to an Epson printer, you get some noise and some output on paper. Laser printer formats are page-oriented, and are not "evolved from plain ASCII" in the way that sending a paragraph of raw ASCII text would yield visible output on paper, even if a "formfeed" provokes the printer to load paper and print a page (not sure if this even works). Even in PCL, you need to provide some commands to the printer, to place some text on the page and get it "rendered on paper". Let alone PostScript - quite a tightly specified "well formed" format. Obviously you can embed bitmaps in PCL and PostScript print jobs. Esc*P can do it too. When printing from modern software, every page can be just a huge embedded bitmap. And, there are printers that can *only* print bitmaps, albeit in a thin wrap of some standardized format: think PCLm (in spite of its name, it is a gutted / stripped down version of PDF). Umm... getting off topic, am I... Frank
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