> >Remember, each different GDI printer needs its own driver... > I have mentioned this so many times. ProForma as it stands will only > print to printers for which it has drivers and there are no ESC/P raster > drivers. The cheap printers have no emulations. Even the expensive > printers often have no emulations and some that have ESC/P2 - like my > C80 - print from the QL and from Q40 but not from QPC2 which will > happily print to the EPL 6200 using ESC/P2. It is a veritable minefield. Yet looking at the Epson documentation, my Stylus 880 for example has a 'raster graphics compatibility mode' whatever that may be.
I haven't been able to find anyone able to answer this fully. It seems that some of these textless printers we assume are good for nothing do have a broad equivalent of a graphics mode, some with compression to reduce (and so speed up) the transfer of rasterised data. Since Proforma does devolve text down to raster graphics there may be scope for investigating possibilities here. If it is indeed true that at least some of these printers have raster graphics possibilities, it is definitely worth progressing with Proforma as although it won't by itself solve the Windows-only printer problem, if it does turn out that there is a route to these printers even if only blindly sending graphics data via a PAR or SER port, we may yet see a route ahead with them. As there are plenty of Linux drivers out there complete with sources, it's worth someone with the necessary knowledge having a look at what the Linux driver does. As we have sources for a PAR driver, it may not be beyond the bo unds of possibility that at least some of these printers are accessible even if indirectly. The Epson documentation is much less than clear on this - the raster codes (just two or three) it lists may be just to switch the printer out of "Epson mode" into Windows-only mode, I can't tell from the documentation and I haven't a Windows-only printer to try. It would be fairly straightforward I think to create a file with the right byte values in it and some random meaningless graphics such as a series of squares to copy_n to a printer, but I'm not very optimistic to be honest. Yuk, this is getting messy. It would have been nice and clear cut if I could have given a 'no chance whatsoever' or 'good chance' reply, but now I find myself in that horrible '1% chance' scenario where I originally thought there was hope, then thought 'no chance' and so on. Dilwyn Jones _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
