[Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Tim Fadden]

On 1/10/2014 5:04 PM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> 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 :)
>
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Guess I Need to RTFM!  my bad.....    Straight to a printer would be 
nice though.

Tim