Shopsmith Forums

I realize current ink jet printers are "page printers", but need to know how "graphics" printing is accomplished.

Basically, what coding is required to place 'dots' on the page?

I assume this is industry standard coding(differences are handled in the drivers).

So anyone know where to go to get 'coding definitions'?

FWIW I be intending to print to a Brother printer.

Check which "printer language" your printer supports (usually something like PCL or Postcript). The printer language will be your coding standard.

Generally there are alternative ways to accomplish placing dots on the page, than talking directly to the printer, though.

admin wrote:Check which "printer language" your printer supports (usually something like PCL or Postcript). The printer language will be your coding standard.

Generally there are alternative ways to accomplish placing dots on the page, than talking directly to the printer, though.

As is usual for me, I 'want' to do some 'non-standard' stuff.

Thank You for the 'reminder' that PCL exists.

A journey into the partially known/unknown begins!

JPG, I was cutting my teeth in the computer industry 30 years ago when the PCL (Page Control Language) and Postscript were being developed (and I have forgotten most of what I knew ). Writing directly to the printer engine is a bitch (pardon the expression). It can be done, but it doesn't work very well.

Like asking for pictures to help a shopsmith owner, what are you trying to acomplish in your quest?

Dick

How about using CUPS, it seems über geekish.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS

Good luck!

Yes what are you trying to do?

Being an old DOS user you must know how bad it was back in the day trying to do printouts...... don't miss spreadsheets and having to send printer codes to get the printer to do what you wanted.

In fact it was about 2 years ago I came upon my old PCL5 manuals, trashed them(actually recycled them). Never ever what to go through that stuff again.

I remember getting my first dot matrix printer for home that had graphics capabilities..... had one reserved programmable matrix, well I was excited about that and wrote code to do the graphics from my Commodore 64 and Vic 20, I think it was a 1526 printer, is that right? Wow was that primitive.

Actually that printing situation is what got me started using windows. And speaking of that today I have officially adopted windows10 preview and installed it on my main hard drive, no going back now.

Ed

Wow this is a fun memory lane thread!!

Back in late 80s a friend was trying to transform an Okidata (or maybe Epson) dot-matrix printer into something that could print wire frame vectors using a coordinate system of some sort . For CAD drawings we had an expensive HP printer with fiber point pens that always ran out of ink at the most inopportune time. He wanted to reproduce those drawings on a smaller scale, but print them like they were lines.

He was trying to print the space shuttle (remember when that was used to demo monitors!?).

Within a few seconds the sprocket holes in the paper were larger and the pref on the side of the paper had torn in areas allowing the platen to crease the paper as it rolled forward and back.

Before he finished, the printer screeched (literally), everything stopped moving and the tiny motor moving the head died a painful death.

Later he went to work for HP. Probably set them back 20 years in their R&D!

Thanks! I hadn't thought of that in decades!

Be well,
Ben

I am intending to create bar code like stuff.

I know how to do it with old dot matrix printers(I still have 'several'), but the ink jet printers output is so much better!!!

I may go that route.(use Dos in the process ) "copy stuff prn"

Will have to use my XP computer that has parallel printer ports.

Will also use "Basic" compiler.

Just a test to see if the phone can read this.

Ed

Works like a charm.

JPG wrote:I am intending to create bar code like stuff.

I know how to do it with old dot matrix printers(I still have 'several'), but the ink jet printers output is so much better!!!

I may go that route.(use Dos in the process ) "copy stuff prn"

Will have to use my XP computer that has parallel printer ports.

Will also use "Basic" compiler.

Why not create a bitmap file, and then print it like any other .bmp file? Then you won't have to worry about printer languages.

This does bring back memories. Way back when, to familiarize myself with a new Pascal compiler, I wrote a program that turned a daisy-wheel printer into a typewriter. Our secretary used it to fill out carbonless forms for years, until the printer finally died.

More seriously, I wrote an X-Y graphing program for HP pen plotters; we used it to output a variety of data captured from our experimental robots. The plotter language was good old HPGL (HP Graphics Language). I think that HP printers may still support it. The only commands that I still remember are PU (pen up) and PD (pen down), but it was really easy to draw vectors and such with it.