Re: [Freedos-user] Code pages in dot-matrix printers
Hi, I have some sources for graphical printing onto Epson FX-80 compatible printers and and for converting fonts to/from binary representation for this program. While there is no distinctive license present, it seems like phrase these sources can be freely used and modified puts it into public domain. Also there is much more powerful program, that was widely used while dot-matrix printing was still actual. It shows full preview of what going to be printed, allows you to print in graphics for quality and different fonts styles and sizes or to upload fonts in printer for faster printing, if printer support it, break text into pages, auto-numerate pages and there is even more useful features. But there is no license or even mention of terms of use at all. And what is worse, there is no sources for it. If you interested, I can send you both, as they can be evaluated even without printer, but be prepared for comments in sources, documentation and interface all in Russian. On 06.05.11 03:09, Eric Auer wrote: Hi Henrique, Bret, interesting to know that there's someone out there, familiar to FreeDOS, still using those 9-pin printers. At least here in Brazil they're still used on lots of places because of their low operational cost. Well, Eric and Konstantyn... So much for the museum idea! Well... We had a 24 pin printer 20 years ago and I patched some closed source tools which were hardcoded for a 9 pin printer from 25-30 years ago to work with that new printer when the old 9 pin broke, so... ;-) Anyway, regarding your question and the comment from Bret: I think you can do quite a bit with ESC/P, HP PCL and PostScript when you stick to basic feature sets, as those tend to be in the common denominator of things supported by different variants of said printer languages. You can check the FreeDOS GRAPHICS source codes for the general idea if you like, Bret :-) The short story for printing text as graphics is as follows: You send some ESC sequence to initiate graphics mode, then you send a header sequence saying that N columns of pixel data follow and then you send the pixel data as either 1 or 3 bytes per column (8 or 24 pins used). For 24 pins, you can either scale a VGA font, increase margins, or both, or design a special printer font. I think scaling 8x8 would be a bit pointless (can just use low quality 8 pin mode then, even 24 pin head printers support that) so I would either go for 8x16 and leave 8 pins unused (line spacing and thus papere movement per line of graphics are adjustable after all) or try to tweak-scale 8x14 to ca 2 times 8x12. For PostScript and HP PCL, the pixel data formats are different, but you can be very creative with PostScript anyway. Actually uploading a font might be a good choice for the latter, or turning the font to some sort of rendering macro that you would send as header before the text that you want to be printed. As far as I remember, HP PCL pixel data was row oriented, so you send all pixels for one stripe of paper (e.g. as wide as suitable to print 80 characters if that is the output style you have in mind) at a time and the printer itself decides how to pool pixels to avoid having to move the print head too much. Usually it would flush the pool when a page gets full or no new data arrives for a certain amount of time. Regards, Eric -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Code pages in dot-matrix printers
Yes Eric, now that you mentioned that, it was what I did with that Epson LX-800 printer that I had - but, as I had said, I used MS-DOS 6.0 and QBASIC for that. Developing a wholly independent program for that is something else - which I don't know how. My question is still up, Eric: Would you be interested? I know that you said regarding your question but I think I didn't understand what you meant. Let me see - your idea was to give coordinates on how to do the whole thing? If it was that, it was helpless. I'm sorry. It seems that you have the knowledge to develop the printer driver (well, a program that would send pixel data to printers). I could enter with the info on the pixel data itself. I have a huge text file with many glyphs in the format below. You'll see the Euro sign as an example. That huge text file is composed primarily by extracted data from the 8x16 font files of all codepages that I had prepared for FreeDOS' CPI files until 2006. That was part of a partnership between me and Mateusz Viste for his Foxtype Unicode text file viewer for FreeDOS. He provided the software that extracted data from the font files. In a following step, I edited that huge text file directly to enter more Unicode chars which weren't (some still aren't) part of any codepage. #20AC .... .@@..@@. @@.. @... @@.. @@.. @@.. .@@..@@. .... The number refers to the hex code (Unicode). Naturally, every dot would be a 0 and every @ would be a 1; with a little math, we have pixel data for any printer. The following step would be to create association files. I would prepare them. Let's say that we would have a file called CP858.TXT, which would be checked by, let's say, PRINTER.EXE. There would be a line which would read: D5, 20AC Then, I would run C:\ PRINTER 858 Now, PRINTER.EXE knows that it would have to check CP858.TXT. If, when intercepting data being sent to a printer, it receives byte D5h, it would send the glyph code 20AC from the text file I have here. You see, Bert and Eric, that in what concerns the characters themselves, I have that figured out already (ok, perhaps I missed something - if you feel that to be the case, please let me know). However, in what concerns *how to send the data to the printer*, someone else will be needed for that. I think that you both agree that we could forget about the idea of developing software to extract data from CPI files (no matter who would do that). That leaves another variable out of the equation and simplifies the whole process, in my opinion. Cheers, Henrique Em 5/5/2011 20:09, Eric Auer escreveu: Hi Henrique, Bret, interesting to know that there's someone out there, familiar to FreeDOS, still using those 9-pin printers. At least here in Brazil they're still used on lots of places because of their low operational cost. Well, Eric and Konstantyn... So much for the museum idea! Well... We had a 24 pin printer 20 years ago and I patched some closed source tools which were hardcoded for a 9 pin printer from 25-30 years ago to work with that new printer when the old 9 pin broke, so... ;-) Anyway, regarding your question and the comment from Bret: I think you can do quite a bit with ESC/P, HP PCL and PostScript when you stick to basic feature sets, as those tend to be in the common denominator of things supported by different variants of said printer languages. You can check the FreeDOS GRAPHICS source codes for the general idea if you like, Bret :-) The short story for printing text as graphics is as follows: You send some ESC sequence to initiate graphics mode, then you send a header sequence saying that N columns of pixel data follow and then you send the pixel data as either 1 or 3 bytes per column (8 or 24 pins used). For 24 pins, you can either scale a VGA font, increase margins, or both, or design a special printer font. I think scaling 8x8 would be a bit pointless (can just use low quality 8 pin mode then, even 24 pin head printers support that) so I would either go for 8x16 and leave 8 pins unused (line spacing and thus papere movement per line of graphics are adjustable after all) or try to tweak-scale 8x14 to ca 2 times 8x12. For PostScript and HP PCL, the pixel data formats are different, but you can be very creative with PostScript anyway. Actually uploading a font might be a good choice for the latter, or turning the font to some sort of rendering macro that you would send as header before the text that you want to be printed. As far as I remember, HP PCL pixel data was row oriented, so you send all pixels for one stripe of paper (e.g. as wide as suitable to print 80 characters if that is the output style you have in mind) at a time and the printer itself decides how to pool pixels to avoid having to move the print head too much. Usually it would flush the pool when a page gets full or no
[Freedos-user] Word processing
Is available any new wordprocessor for DOS? On this old talk recommend msword for DOS (free as free beer) http://www.computing.net/answers/dos/free-word-processor/16280.html -- -- +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Marco A. Achury -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Word processing
On 05/06/2011 06:43 AM, Marco Achury wrote: Is available any new wordprocessor for DOS? On this old talk recommend msword for DOS (free as free beer) http://www.computing.net/answers/dos/free-word-processor/16280.html Hi Marco, There are several sites for downloading WordPerfect 4.2, the best DOS word processor I ever used. http://vetusware.com/download/WordPerfect%204.2/?id=3635 Jim -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Word processing
WordPerfect 5.1 was even better, but took a lot more computer power. -Original Message- From: Jim Lemon [mailto:j...@bitwrit.com.au] Sent: Friday, May 06, 2011 5:06 AM To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] Word processing On 05/06/2011 06:43 AM, Marco Achury wrote: Is available any new wordprocessor for DOS? On this old talk recommend msword for DOS (free as free beer) http://www.computing.net/answers/dos/free-word-processor/16280.html Hi Marco, There are several sites for downloading WordPerfect 4.2, the best DOS word processor I ever used. http://vetusware.com/download/WordPerfect%204.2/?id=3635 Jim -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Code pages in dot-matrix printers
Henrique Peron hpe...@terra.com.br wrote in news:4dc2ebc0.30...@terra.com.br: I just read a PDF file Epson ESC/P Reference Manual. It explains that 24-pin printers can receive definitions on 241 characters into its RAM but those 9-pin LX printers cannot. They can only receive 6 characters. It seems that uploading a codepage into a printer's RAM is out of the question. :-( Perhaps the idea (which is what I did once with a 9-pin Epson LX-800 that I had) is to manipulate the printer head directly. That would leave CPI files and hardcoded printer codepages out of the equation. That would force me to manually provide the data (through a TXT file) which would be sent to a printer through some program which would pose as a printer driver. I would like to elaborate more on this but it seems this is the wrong freedos-list to do that. I have some ideas and perhaps we could work together on a printer driver for FreeDOS. If you're willing to accept the very slow printing speed of your printer's graphics mode then you may want to investigate GhostScript, which already provides a wide variety of fonts, sizes and printer drivers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript#.22Hello_world.22 http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/AFPL/get510.htm -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Code pages in dot-matrix printers
Hi Mark, it's not about willing to accept. Unfortunately, printing on graphics mode seems to be the only common denominator among all brands and models of printers. Naturally, if someone needs a character table which is already hardcoded to his/her printer, all (s)he will have to do is to setup his/her printer accordingly and print on text mode. However, many printers have a very reduced set of character tables; furthermore, there are a lot of codepages which I created for FreeDOS which naturally aren't hardcoded anywhere. Last but not least - the DOS drivers you pointed us to refer to 32-bit DOS. Henrique Em 6/5/2011 11:20, Mark Blain escreveu: Henrique Peronhpe...@terra.com.br wrote in news:4dc2ebc0.30...@terra.com.br: I just read a PDF file Epson ESC/P Reference Manual. It explains that 24-pin printers can receive definitions on 241 characters into its RAM but those 9-pin LX printers cannot. They can only receive 6 characters. It seems that uploading a codepage into a printer's RAM is out of the question. :-( Perhaps the idea (which is what I did once with a 9-pin Epson LX-800 that I had) is to manipulate the printer head directly. That would leave CPI files and hardcoded printer codepages out of the equation. That would force me to manually provide the data (through a TXT file) which would be sent to a printer through some program which would pose as a printer driver. I would like to elaborate more on this but it seems this is the wrong freedos-list to do that. I have some ideas and perhaps we could work together on a printer driver for FreeDOS. If you're willing to accept the very slow printing speed of your printer's graphics mode then you may want to investigate GhostScript, which already provides a wide variety of fonts, sizes and printer drivers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript#.22Hello_world.22 http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/AFPL/get510.htm -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Code pages in dot-matrix printers
On 24 pin Epson printers, you can print graphics as fast as printing text. there is a special mode where consecutive high definition dots cannot be on, which is the text mode printing trick... But I believe that even if you use the more universal mode, it will be fast enough, specially if compared with the alternative which is no mode at all... It woul be best if you could devise a method to automaticaly translate the screen bitmaps do printer bitmaps... Alain Em 06-05-2011 13:51, Henrique Peron escreveu: Hi Mark, it's not about willing to accept. Unfortunately, printing on graphics mode seems to be the only common denominator among all brands and models of printers. Naturally, if someone needs a character table which is already hardcoded to his/her printer, all (s)he will have to do is to setup his/her printer accordingly and print on text mode. However, many printers have a very reduced set of character tables; furthermore, there are a lot of codepages which I created for FreeDOS which naturally aren't hardcoded anywhere. Last but not least - the DOS drivers you pointed us to refer to 32-bit DOS. Henrique Em 6/5/2011 11:20, Mark Blain escreveu: Henrique Peronhpe...@terra.com.br wrote in news:4dc2ebc0.30...@terra.com.br: I just read a PDF file Epson ESC/P Reference Manual. It explains that 24-pin printers can receive definitions on 241 characters into its RAM but those 9-pin LX printers cannot. They can only receive 6 characters. It seems that uploading a codepage into a printer's RAM is out of the question. :-( Perhaps the idea (which is what I did once with a 9-pin Epson LX-800 that I had) is to manipulate the printer head directly. That would leave CPI files and hardcoded printer codepages out of the equation. That would force me to manually provide the data (through a TXT file) which would be sent to a printer through some program which would pose as a printer driver. I would like to elaborate more on this but it seems this is the wrong freedos-list to do that. I have some ideas and perhaps we could work together on a printer driver for FreeDOS. If you're willing to accept the very slow printing speed of your printer's graphics mode then you may want to investigate GhostScript, which already provides a wide variety of fonts, sizes and printer drivers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript#.22Hello_world.22 http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/AFPL/get510.htm -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Code pages in dot-matrix printers
Sounds very interesting. Look around for the TT font named GNU Unifont, contains a very big subset of unicode and is not vectorial, is based on bitmaps, looks ready for dot matrix printing. Your gliph file is freely available? Best regards Marco Achury El 06/05/2011 03:30 a.m., Henrique Peron escribió: Yes Eric, now that you mentioned that, it was what I did with that Epson LX-800 printer that I had - but, as I had said, I used MS-DOS 6.0 and QBASIC for that. Developing a wholly independent program for that is something else - which I don't know how. My question is still up, Eric: Would you be interested? I know that you said regarding your question but I think I didn't understand what you meant. Let me see - your idea was to give coordinates on how to do the whole thing? If it was that, it was helpless. I'm sorry. It seems that you have the knowledge to develop the printer driver (well, a program that would send pixel data to printers). I could enter with the info on the pixel data itself. I have a huge text file with many glyphs in the format below. You'll see the Euro sign as an example. That huge text file is composed primarily by extracted data from the 8x16 font files of all codepages that I had prepared for FreeDOS' CPI files until 2006. That was part of a partnership between me and Mateusz Viste for his Foxtype Unicode text file viewer for FreeDOS. He provided the software that extracted data from the font files. In a following step, I edited that huge text file directly to enter more Unicode chars which weren't (some still aren't) part of any codepage. #20AC .... .@@..@@. @@.. @... @@.. @@.. @@.. .@@..@@. .... The number refers to the hex code (Unicode). Naturally, every dot would be a 0 and every @ would be a 1; with a little math, we have pixel data for any printer. The following step would be to create association files. I would prepare them. Let's say that we would have a file called CP858.TXT, which would be checked by, let's say, PRINTER.EXE. There would be a line which would read: D5, 20AC Then, I would run C:\ PRINTER 858 Now, PRINTER.EXE knows that it would have to check CP858.TXT. If, when intercepting data being sent to a printer, it receives byte D5h, it would send the glyph code 20AC from the text file I have here. You see, Bert and Eric, that in what concerns the characters themselves, I have that figured out already (ok, perhaps I missed something - if you feel that to be the case, please let me know). However, in what concerns *how to send the data to the printer*, someone else will be needed for that. I think that you both agree that we could forget about the idea of developing software to extract data from CPI files (no matter who would do that). That leaves another variable out of the equation and simplifies the whole process, in my opinion. Cheers, Henrique Em 5/5/2011 20:09, Eric Auer escreveu: Hi Henrique, Bret, interesting to know that there's someone out there, familiar to FreeDOS, still using those 9-pin printers. At least here in Brazil they're still used on lots of places because of their low operational cost. Well, Eric and Konstantyn... So much for the museum idea! Well... We had a 24 pin printer 20 years ago and I patched some closed source tools which were hardcoded for a 9 pin printer from 25-30 years ago to work with that new printer when the old 9 pin broke, so... ;-) Anyway, regarding your question and the comment from Bret: I think you can do quite a bit with ESC/P, HP PCL and PostScript when you stick to basic feature sets, as those tend to be in the common denominator of things supported by different variants of said printer languages. You can check the FreeDOS GRAPHICS source codes for the general idea if you like, Bret :-) The short story for printing text as graphics is as follows: You send some ESC sequence to initiate graphics mode, then you send a header sequence saying that N columns of pixel data follow and then you send the pixel data as either 1 or 3 bytes per column (8 or 24 pins used). For 24 pins, you can either scale a VGA font, increase margins, or both, or design a special printer font. I think scaling 8x8 would be a bit pointless (can just use low quality 8 pin mode then, even 24 pin head printers support that) so I would either go for 8x16 and leave 8 pins unused (line spacing and thus papere movement per line of graphics are adjustable after all) or try to tweak-scale 8x14 to ca 2 times 8x12. For PostScript and HP PCL, the pixel data formats are different, but you can be very creative with PostScript anyway. Actually uploading a font might be a good choice for the latter, or turning the font to some sort of rendering macro that you would send as header before the text that you want to be printed. As
Re: [Freedos-user] Code pages in dot-matrix printers
Freely available, Marco. I just didn't upload it into the FreeDOS database because it was meant for (my) internal work only. I sent a copy of that huge file to Viste for him to include it as an internal database for his Foxtype Unicode text file viewer. However, should any software developer be interested on that, I could upload it into the FreeDOS database so that I would maintain it. There would always be new glyphs to be included. Therefore, I would always keep updating that huge text file. Let me call it a glyph database. That GNU Unifont bitmap file you mentioned is better in a way, because it is far more comprehensive than mine. However, it bases its characters on a 16x16 matrix, instead of an 8x16 one. Anyway, I'll e-mail the author. Thank you for the info! Best regards, Henrique Peron Em 6/5/2011 14:12, Marco Achury escreveu: Sounds very interesting. Look around for the TT font named GNU Unifont, contains a very big subset of unicode and is not vectorial, is based on bitmaps, looks ready for dot matrix printing. Your gliph file is freely available? Best regards Marco Achury El 06/05/2011 03:30 a.m., Henrique Peron escribió: Yes Eric, now that you mentioned that, it was what I did with that Epson LX-800 printer that I had - but, as I had said, I used MS-DOS 6.0 and QBASIC for that. Developing a wholly independent program for that is something else - which I don't know how. My question is still up, Eric: Would you be interested? I know that you said regarding your question but I think I didn't understand what you meant. Let me see - your idea was to give coordinates on how to do the whole thing? If it was that, it was helpless. I'm sorry. It seems that you have the knowledge to develop the printer driver (well, a program that would send pixel data to printers). I could enter with the info on the pixel data itself. I have a huge text file with many glyphs in the format below. You'll see the Euro sign as an example. That huge text file is composed primarily by extracted data from the 8x16 font files of all codepages that I had prepared for FreeDOS' CPI files until 2006. That was part of a partnership between me and Mateusz Viste for his Foxtype Unicode text file viewer for FreeDOS. He provided the software that extracted data from the font files. In a following step, I edited that huge text file directly to enter more Unicode chars which weren't (some still aren't) part of any codepage. #20AC .... .@@..@@. @@.. @... @@.. @@.. @@.. .@@..@@. .... The number refers to the hex code (Unicode). Naturally, every dot would be a 0 and every @ would be a 1; with a little math, we have pixel data for any printer. The following step would be to create association files. I would prepare them. Let's say that we would have a file called CP858.TXT, which would be checked by, let's say, PRINTER.EXE. There would be a line which would read: D5, 20AC Then, I would run C:\ PRINTER 858 Now, PRINTER.EXE knows that it would have to check CP858.TXT. If, when intercepting data being sent to a printer, it receives byte D5h, it would send the glyph code 20AC from the text file I have here. You see, Bert and Eric, that in what concerns the characters themselves, I have that figured out already (ok, perhaps I missed something - if you feel that to be the case, please let me know). However, in what concerns *how to send the data to the printer*, someone else will be needed for that. I think that you both agree that we could forget about the idea of developing software to extract data from CPI files (no matter who would do that). That leaves another variable out of the equation and simplifies the whole process, in my opinion. Cheers, Henrique Em 5/5/2011 20:09, Eric Auer escreveu: Hi Henrique, Bret, interesting to know that there's someone out there, familiar to FreeDOS, still using those 9-pin printers. At least here in Brazil they're still used on lots of places because of their low operational cost. Well, Eric and Konstantyn... So much for the museum idea! Well... We had a 24 pin printer 20 years ago and I patched some closed source tools which were hardcoded for a 9 pin printer from 25-30 years ago to work with that new printer when the old 9 pin broke, so... ;-) Anyway, regarding your question and the comment from Bret: I think you can do quite a bit with ESC/P, HP PCL and PostScript when you stick to basic feature sets, as those tend to be in the common denominator of things supported by different variants of said printer languages. You can check the FreeDOS GRAPHICS source codes for the general idea if you like, Bret :-) The short story for printing text as graphics is as follows: You send some ESC sequence to initiate graphics mode, then you send a header sequence saying that N columns of pixel data follow
Re: [Freedos-user] Code pages in dot-matrix printers
Henrique Peron hpe...@terra.com.br wrote in news:4dc42724.7020...@terra.com.br: Hi Mark, it's not about willing to accept. Unfortunately, printing on graphics mode seems to be the only common denominator among all brands and models of printers. Naturally, if someone needs a character table which is already hardcoded to his/her printer, all (s)he will have to do is to setup his/her printer accordingly and print on text mode. However, many printers have a very reduced set of character tables; furthermore, there are a lot of codepages which I created for FreeDOS which naturally aren't hardcoded anywhere. Last but not least - the DOS drivers you pointed us to refer to 32-bit DOS. Henrique Ah, I didn't catch that. You could find an older 16-bit GhostScript, but it doesn't sound like scalable fonts are your current goal. -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Code pages in dot-matrix printers
Hi Mark, Henrique, ghostscript in general is a nice tool and there are ports for DOS which work in FreeDOS or are even made for FreeDOS, I think that for example Blair made one such port. Using 32 bit DOS C compilers is no big problem, things still run on 16 bit DOS but you will need a 386 or newer CPU. Another nice detail is that ghostscript can output several printer languages, PDF and PS. However, the main purpose of ghostscript is to read postscript. As such, it is not meant to be used as a small tool or even a driver to convert plain text into a picture of that text with a given bitmap font. In fact, ghostscript would be a *very* bloated software if you only want to do that ;-) Eric PS: I think 8x16 fonts or 16x16 fonts are not that bad. And it is indeed true that graphics modes with a limited horizontal resolution print much faster... In fact 180x180 dpi fits text printing, speed and compatibility very well on ESC/P printers. ... Last but not least - the DOS drivers you pointed us to refer to 32-bit DOS. Ah, I didn't catch that. You could find an older 16-bit GhostScript, but it doesn't sound like scalable fonts are your current goal. -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Word processing
Hi, On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 3:43 PM, Marco Achury marcoach...@gmail.com wrote: Is available any new wordprocessor for DOS? Have you tried VDE? EdiTury? GNU Emacs 23.3? I know they aren't perfect, or maybe even slightly suitable, but they have some weird non-ASCII features, so Oh, and Mined is cool for Unicode. http://sites.google.com/site/vdeeditor/Home http://www.webalice.it/turylicciardi/editor.htm http://djgpp.cybermirror.org/current/v2gnu/em2303b.zip (40 MB!) http://www.towo.net/mined Other than that, I dunno (or can't think of anything) -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Word processing
WP5.1 was my first word processor, it came with my first PC. Blank color for bold letters and highlighted text for underlining it was enough for my bw printer!!! WP6.1 for DOS was also my first experience with WYSWYG software but way too powerful for my then-486. So I stayed with WP5.1 until Word 95. The funny part is that I feel I used more WP5.1 in those two years that the 4-year-old office 2007 I use at work now. Sorry for this OT but the post made me remember my early days with PC's Sent from my iPhone On 06/05/2011, at 09:32, David C. Kerber dker...@warrenrogersassociates.com wrote: WordPerfect 5.1 was even better, but took a lot more computer power. -Original Message- From: Jim Lemon [mailto:j...@bitwrit.com.au] Sent: Friday, May 06, 2011 5:06 AM To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] Word processing On 05/06/2011 06:43 AM, Marco Achury wrote: Is available any new wordprocessor for DOS? On this old talk recommend msword for DOS (free as free beer) http://www.computing.net/answers/dos/free-word-processor/16280.html Hi Marco, There are several sites for downloading WordPerfect 4.2, the best DOS word processor I ever used. http://vetusware.com/download/WordPerfect%204.2/?id=3635 Jim -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Code pages in dot-matrix printers
Hi Eric, Mark, Ok - I have a glyph database of 8x16 chars in a single text file. Would that do for a start? Or the idea is to wait for someone volunteer on developing software to automatically convert screen fonts to the printer? Henrique Em 6/5/2011 17:09, Eric Auer escreveu: Hi Mark, Henrique, ghostscript in general is a nice tool and there are ports for DOS which work in FreeDOS or are even made for FreeDOS, I think that for example Blair made one such port. Using 32 bit DOS C compilers is no big problem, things still run on 16 bit DOS but you will need a 386 or newer CPU. Another nice detail is that ghostscript can output several printer languages, PDF and PS. However, the main purpose of ghostscript is to read postscript. As such, it is not meant to be used as a small tool or even a driver to convert plain text into a picture of that text with a given bitmap font. In fact, ghostscript would be a *very* bloated software if you only want to do that ;-) Eric PS: I think 8x16 fonts or 16x16 fonts are not that bad. And it is indeed true that graphics modes with a limited horizontal resolution print much faster... In fact 180x180 dpi fits text printing, speed and compatibility very well on ESC/P printers. ... Last but not least - the DOS drivers you pointed us to refer to 32-bit DOS. Ah, I didn't catch that. You could find an older 16-bit GhostScript, but it doesn't sound like scalable fonts are your current goal. -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Code pages in dot-matrix printers
Henrique: Read this: http://czyborra.com/unifont/ Unifont uses 8x16 matrix for latin characters and many others with low complexity. For chinese and other complex characters use 16x16, so complex chartacters will take 2 text positions on the printed output. The hex unifont is at: http://www.czyborra.com/unifont/unifont.hex.gz examples on the above page: 0041: ---##--- --#--#-- --#--#-- -##- -##- -##- -##- -##- -##- -##- 4E21: -#-- ---# ---# --###--- --###--- --#-#--#--#-#--- --#-#--#--#-#--- --#-#--#--#-#--- --#-#--#--#-#--- --#-###-#--- --#-#-#-#--- --#-#--- --###--- El 06/05/2011 02:38 p.m., Henrique Peron escribió: Freely available, Marco. I just didn't upload it into the FreeDOS database because it was meant for (my) internal work only. I sent a copy of that huge file to Viste for him to include it as an internal database for his Foxtype Unicode text file viewer. However, should any software developer be interested on that, I could upload it into the FreeDOS database so that I would maintain it. There would always be new glyphs to be included. Therefore, I would always keep updating that huge text file. Let me call it a glyph database. That GNU Unifont bitmap file you mentioned is better in a way, because it is far more comprehensive than mine. However, it bases its characters on a 16x16 matrix, instead of an 8x16 one. Anyway, I'll e-mail the author. Thank you for the info! Best regards, Henrique Peron Em 6/5/2011 14:12, Marco Achury escreveu: Sounds very interesting. Look around for the TT font named GNU Unifont, contains a very big subset of unicode and is not vectorial, is based on bitmaps, looks ready for dot matrix printing. Your gliph file is freely available? Best regards Marco Achury El 06/05/2011 03:30 a.m., Henrique Peron escribió: Yes Eric, now that you mentioned that, it was what I did with that Epson LX-800 printer that I had - but, as I had said, I used MS-DOS 6.0 and QBASIC for that. Developing a wholly independent program for that is something else - which I don't know how. My question is still up, Eric: Would you be interested? I know that you said regarding your question but I think I didn't understand what you meant. Let me see - your idea was to give coordinates on how to do the whole thing? If it was that, it was helpless. I'm sorry. It seems that you have the knowledge to develop the printer driver (well, a program that would send pixel data to printers). I could enter with the info on the pixel data itself. I have a huge text file with many glyphs in the format below. You'll see the Euro sign as an example. That huge text file is composed primarily by extracted data from the 8x16 font files of all codepages that I had prepared for FreeDOS' CPI files until 2006. That was part of a partnership between me and Mateusz Viste for his Foxtype Unicode text file viewer for FreeDOS. He provided the software that extracted data from the font files. In a following step, I edited that huge text file directly to enter more Unicode chars which weren't (some still aren't) part of any codepage. #20AC .... .@@..@@. @@.. @... @@.. @@.. @@.. .@@..@@. .... The number refers to the hex code (Unicode). Naturally, every dot would be a 0 and every @ would be a 1; with a little math, we have pixel data for any printer. The following step would be to create association files. I would prepare them. Let's say that we would have a file called CP858.TXT, which would be checked by, let's say, PRINTER.EXE. There would be a line which would read: D5, 20AC Then, I would run C:\ PRINTER 858 Now, PRINTER.EXE knows that it would have to check CP858.TXT. If, when intercepting data being sent to a printer, it receives byte D5h, it would send the glyph code 20AC from the text file I have here. You see, Bert and Eric, that in what concerns the characters themselves, I have that figured out already (ok, perhaps I missed something - if you feel that to be the case, please let me know). However, in what concerns *how to send the data to the printer*, someone else will be needed for that. I think that you both agree that we could forget about the idea of developing software to extract data from CPI files (no matter who would do that). That leaves another variable out of the equation and simplifies the whole process, in my opinion. Cheers, Henrique Em 5/5/2011
Re: [Freedos-user] Code pages in dot-matrix printers
In the printes, fonts should have Low Res 9 pin: 72/6 = 12 pixels Low Res 24 pin: 180/6= 30 pixels Hi Res 9 pin: 144/6= 24 pixels Hi Res 24 pin: 360/6= 60 pixels This for the whole line (glyph + spacing). Can tou imagine how to convert your database to work with these resolutions? Alain Em 06-05-2011 23:33, Henrique Peron escreveu: Hi Eric, Mark, Ok - I have a glyph database of 8x16 chars in a single text file. Would that do for a start? Or the idea is to wait for someone volunteer on developing software to automatically convert screen fonts to the printer? Henrique Em 6/5/2011 17:09, Eric Auer escreveu: Hi Mark, Henrique, ghostscript in general is a nice tool and there are ports for DOS which work in FreeDOS or are even made for FreeDOS, I think that for example Blair made one such port. Using 32 bit DOS C compilers is no big problem, things still run on 16 bit DOS but you will need a 386 or newer CPU. Another nice detail is that ghostscript can output several printer languages, PDF and PS. However, the main purpose of ghostscript is to read postscript. As such, it is not meant to be used as a small tool or even a driver to convert plain text into a picture of that text with a given bitmap font. In fact, ghostscript would be a *very* bloated software if you only want to do that ;-) Eric PS: I think 8x16 fonts or 16x16 fonts are not that bad. And it is indeed true that graphics modes with a limited horizontal resolution print much faster... In fact 180x180 dpi fits text printing, speed and compatibility very well on ESC/P printers. ... Last but not least - the DOS drivers you pointed us to refer to 32-bit DOS. Ah, I didn't catch that. You could find an older 16-bit GhostScript, but it doesn't sound like scalable fonts are your current goal. -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Code pages in dot-matrix printers
Alain, the answer is to interpolate the glyphs but I don't know how to do it - by the way, at least on what concerns Epson printers, I think that there's a native way to interpolate low-resolution glyphs. Anyone wishing to develop the printer driver would also have to check Panasonic documentation. Henrique Em 6/5/2011 23:01, Alain Mouette escreveu: In the printes, fonts should have Low Res 9 pin: 72/6 = 12 pixels Low Res 24 pin: 180/6= 30 pixels Hi Res 9 pin: 144/6= 24 pixels Hi Res 24 pin: 360/6= 60 pixels This for the whole line (glyph + spacing). Can tou imagine how to convert your database to work with these resolutions? Alain Em 06-05-2011 23:33, Henrique Peron escreveu: Hi Eric, Mark, Ok - I have a glyph database of 8x16 chars in a single text file. Would that do for a start? Or the idea is to wait for someone volunteer on developing software to automatically convert screen fonts to the printer? Henrique Em 6/5/2011 17:09, Eric Auer escreveu: Hi Mark, Henrique, ghostscript in general is a nice tool and there are ports for DOS which work in FreeDOS or are even made for FreeDOS, I think that for example Blair made one such port. Using 32 bit DOS C compilers is no big problem, things still run on 16 bit DOS but you will need a 386 or newer CPU. Another nice detail is that ghostscript can output several printer languages, PDF and PS. However, the main purpose of ghostscript is to read postscript. As such, it is not meant to be used as a small tool or even a driver to convert plain text into a picture of that text with a given bitmap font. In fact, ghostscript would be a *very* bloated software if you only want to do that ;-) Eric PS: I think 8x16 fonts or 16x16 fonts are not that bad. And it is indeed true that graphics modes with a limited horizontal resolution print much faster... In fact 180x180 dpi fits text printing, speed and compatibility very well on ESC/P printers. ... Last but not least - the DOS drivers you pointed us to refer to 32-bit DOS. Ah, I didn't catch that. You could find an older 16-bit GhostScript, but it doesn't sound like scalable fonts are your current goal. -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Code pages in dot-matrix printers
I found very interesting that all the required sizes are multiple of six, so is wise that glyph designer to use a matrix with 6 pixels... Only 9 pins high-res is exact multiple of eigth A simple way is to reduce the character with is to look for 2 consecutive columns with the same bits, and delete one (as contain redundant information) You need to deleted 2 columns on each glyph to get a 6 columns matrix. But to get beauty characters with good simetry is better to do such job by hand. How many characters has you database? A good text editor with column mode (as crimson editor) will help El 07/05/2011 12:35 a.m., Henrique Peron escribió: Alain, the answer is to interpolate the glyphs but I don't know how to do it - by the way, at least on what concerns Epson printers, I think that there's a native way to interpolate low-resolution glyphs. Anyone wishing to develop the printer driver would also have to check Panasonic documentation. Henrique Em 6/5/2011 23:01, Alain Mouette escreveu: In the printes, fonts should have Low Res 9 pin: 72/6 = 12 pixels Low Res 24 pin: 180/6= 30 pixels Hi Res 9 pin: 144/6= 24 pixels Hi Res 24 pin: 360/6= 60 pixels This for the whole line (glyph + spacing). Can tou imagine how to convert your database to work with these resolutions? Alain -- WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Code pages in dot-matrix printers
Very nice site, Marco - I'll contact Czyborra. Thank you, Henrique Em 6/5/2011 21:00, Marco Achury escreveu: Henrique: Read this: http://czyborra.com/unifont/ Unifont uses 8x16 matrix for latin characters and many others with low complexity. For chinese and other complex characters use 16x16, so complex chartacters will take 2 text positions on the printed output. The hex unifont is at: http://www.czyborra.com/unifont/unifont.hex.gz examples on the above page: 0041: ---##--- --#--#-- --#--#-- -##- -##- -##- -##- -##- -##- -##- 4E21: -#-- ---# ---# --###--- --###--- --#-#--#--#-#--- --#-#--#--#-#--- --#-#--#--#-#--- --#-#--#--#-#--- --#-###-#--- --#-#-#-#--- --#-#--- --###--- El 06/05/2011 02:38 p.m., Henrique Peron escribió: Freely available, Marco. I just didn't upload it into the FreeDOS database because it was meant for (my) internal work only. I sent a copy of that huge file to Viste for him to include it as an internal database for his Foxtype Unicode text file viewer. However, should any software developer be interested on that, I could upload it into the FreeDOS database so that I would maintain it. There would always be new glyphs to be included. Therefore, I would always keep updating that huge text file. Let me call it a glyph database. That GNU Unifont bitmap file you mentioned is better in a way, because it is far more comprehensive than mine. However, it bases its characters on a 16x16 matrix, instead of an 8x16 one. Anyway, I'll e-mail the author. Thank you for the info! Best regards, Henrique Peron Em 6/5/2011 14:12, Marco Achury escreveu: Sounds very interesting. Look around for the TT font named GNU Unifont, contains a very big subset of unicode and is not vectorial, is based on bitmaps, looks ready for dot matrix printing. Your gliph file is freely available? Best regards Marco Achury El 06/05/2011 03:30 a.m., Henrique Peron escribió: Yes Eric, now that you mentioned that, it was what I did with that Epson LX-800 printer that I had - but, as I had said, I used MS-DOS 6.0 and QBASIC for that. Developing a wholly independent program for that is something else - which I don't know how. My question is still up, Eric: Would you be interested? I know that you said regarding your question but I think I didn't understand what you meant. Let me see - your idea was to give coordinates on how to do the whole thing? If it was that, it was helpless. I'm sorry. It seems that you have the knowledge to develop the printer driver (well, a program that would send pixel data to printers). I could enter with the info on the pixel data itself. I have a huge text file with many glyphs in the format below. You'll see the Euro sign as an example. That huge text file is composed primarily by extracted data from the 8x16 font files of all codepages that I had prepared for FreeDOS' CPI files until 2006. That was part of a partnership between me and Mateusz Viste for his Foxtype Unicode text file viewer for FreeDOS. He provided the software that extracted data from the font files. In a following step, I edited that huge text file directly to enter more Unicode chars which weren't (some still aren't) part of any codepage. #20AC .... .@@..@@. @@.. @... @@.. @@.. @@.. .@@..@@. .... The number refers to the hex code (Unicode). Naturally, every dot would be a 0 and every @ would be a 1; with a little math, we have pixel data for any printer. The following step would be to create association files. I would prepare them. Let's say that we would have a file called CP858.TXT, which would be checked by, let's say, PRINTER.EXE. There would be a line which would read: D5, 20AC Then, I would run C:\ PRINTER 858 Now, PRINTER.EXE knows that it would have to check CP858.TXT. If, when intercepting data being sent to a printer, it receives byte D5h, it would send the glyph code 20AC from the text file I have here. You see, Bert and Eric, that in what concerns the characters themselves, I have that figured out already (ok, perhaps I missed something - if you feel that to be the case, please let me know). However, in what concerns *how to send the data to the printer*, someone else will be needed for that. I think that you both agree that we could forget about the idea of developing software to extract data from CPI files (no matter who would do that). That leaves another variable out of the equation
