[Coco] CoCoNet

[Roger Taylor]

At 07:22 PM 12/27/2008, you wrote:
>Roger, regarding the following: I had been considering creating a PC 
>program that monitored the com1 or com2 port and acted like a 
>DMP-105. My intention was to have the pc interpret the dmp-105 codes 
>sent from the CoCo and create a BMP or PDF of the page exactly as it 
>would have been printed on the real DMP-105. It could then be 
>printed from the PC to a inkjet or laser printer. Of course, I soon 
>realized that I do not posses the technical know-how to perform such 
>a feat, so maybe some others out there perhaps can do such a thing - 
>maybe even you :) JE

I plan to add the PRINT #-2 support so the PC side could do something 
with that data, but I haven't looked into how I'd handle it 
completely.  The PC wouldn't know when the CoCo is through printing, 
so a file of the print data would probably have to written in chunks 
by opening, writing, closing, so that another app could access the 
file and do whatever with it.

I do know how to create BMP images of printer text which are dumped 
to the PC printer.  This is how Rainbow IDE prints out files.  Some 
kind of CoCo printer emulator would have to be integrated into such a 
program which would draw to the bitmap image for each printable 
page.  A series of BMP images would represent the printer pages.  It 
sounds like a very complex project considering how printer margins 
and page lengths and sizes are dealt with on each side.

-- 
Roger Taylor

http://www.wordofthedayonline.com