Re: typewriter function for an impact printer?

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 05:50:05AM +0530, Raj Kiran Grandhi wrote:
> Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I often have forms to fill out and some would be better not
>> hand-written. However, they all differ so I can't just set-up a
>> template.
>>
>> What I really need is just a typewriter.
>>
>> Does anyone know of an app that will give me an interactive session with
>> my Epson dot-matrix printer? I could feed that in (its an LQ-2080 and
>> will do plain paper), use the enter key in the traditional typewriter
>> way, etc.
>>
>> It shouldn't be too big a deal to do, I just figured I'd see if there's
>> already a solution before I try to reinvent a very old wheel.
>>
>
> Very interesting. While I am not aware of any such app, doesn't
> "cat > /dev/lp0" (or equivalent) work?

That would probably work in a "line mode" sort of way. That is you could get one line at a time. But that wouldn't help with horizontal position. You likely need a way to send each character individually so that you could space-bar your way across the page to the next blank.

What you really need is the control codes for the printer, I suspect and a simple loop to capture characters and feed them to the printer one at a time. YOu may need to translate some of them as well.

There is a technical manual that *almost* qualifies as a technical manual and it shows you how to put the printer in hex dump mode which would allow you to verify that it uses regular ascii codes... it looks like it does, but you'd want to make sure. If that's the case, just send them to the printer. You'd have to experiment to see if you need line-feeds, carriage returns etc...

technical manual:
http://files.support.epson.com/pdf/lq2080/lq2080pg.pdf

A

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