[Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 6:57 PM, Tim Fadden <t.fadden at cox.net> wrote:
> On 1/10/2014 8:10 AM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 9:47 AM, Al Hartman <alhartman6 at optonline.net>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I believe a Coco is powerful enough, it just doesn't have enough memory
>>> to
>>> composite a page.
>>>
>>> A CoCo 3 in Turbo mode with a 2 meg upgrade could probably print simple
>>> text
>>> based pages, and upscale CoCo resolution graphics pages. The limiting
>>> factor
>>> would be the serial port speed, rather than the processor speed.
>>>
>>> Especially, if it was equipped with a hard drive and used a page file.
>>>
>>> I used to sell LaserMaster Printers that did this on 386 based computers,
>>> and this is how an Atari-ST printed to a Laser printer through the DMA
>>> port
>>> with a limit of 2mb of RAM.
>>>
>> Ok.. I think I am understanding your proposal.. stop me if I get it wrong
>> :)
>>
>> You're saying that the CoCo probably could drive a modern printer in a
>> limited fashion, given enough ram etc.  *but* your idea was not that
>> we actually try to do that.  Your idea was that we could take the
>> output that CoCo programs already produce and connect the bitbanger
>> they already use to a PC takes this "legacy" output and drives a
>> modern printer.  Is that accurate?  I hope I'm getting it, because we
>> could easily do this with just a couple changes to DriveWire.
>>
>> DW already knows how to render one type of output (fx80), and the
>> framework supports adding more printer emulations if they were
>> written.
>
>
> Wrong kind of output though.  It outputs to a pdf file, not the raw output
> needed to drive the printer.  And If you send it a file larger than one
> page, you only get the first page.
>
> Not that I belittle what does, just stating a fact.  If there were some way
> to send the raw data to a printer instead of a pdf file, that might prove
> interesting.
>

Actually it generates files in one of several image formats (PNG, jpeg, etc).

It can then invoke the command or script of your choice, which means
you can feed these images to a printer automatically or into a PDF or
pretty much anything else you like.  I suppose I could add an option
to have DW feed the printer directly too, just never had anyone ask
for that :)