[Coco] printing

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 16 November 2014 06:51:04 Josh Harper via Coco did opine
And Gene did reply:
>  hi guys
> I used to pring a lot ofآ  things way back when with theآ  dmp -105
> printerآ  nowآ  thatآ  ribbons are no longer to beآ  found for it is
> there any other optionآ  to still be ableآ  to printآ  stuff using old
> software
> 
> I knowآ  theres some okidataآ  still being soldآ آ آ  butآ  wasmt
> sureآ  it would workآ  dueآ  mostآ  of myآ  software requiredآ  the
> 105 thanksآ  guys

Two things Josh:

1. Please get yourself an email agent that sends plain text, this arrived 
here as a html stripped, base64 encoded message body, without even the 
courtesy of a valid mimetype setting to tell my email agent, an old kmail 
that it was a base64 encoded message. so the above is what I see here.  
Yahoo mail is the problem.  Its broken.

2. That is precisely why I now use the drivewire version of the /p 
descriptor in my coco3's OS9Boot files.  I "list filename >/p" on the 
coco.  Drivewire makes a file on this linux box out of it, in plain text 
mode.

When that file is complete and closed, the closing is detected by a 
utility called inotifywait on this linux box, which triggers a bash script 
that picks up that file, sends it to another directory through a routine 
in that script that only saves the last 25 files, and sends it through the 
cups driver lp, where it is turned into what it takes to drive a B&W laser 
printer sitting on the coco's desk, where, 5 seconds or a bit less after I 
get my prompt back from doing the listing on the coco, that printer fires 
up and spits out that text at 19 pages a minute, giving me far prettier 
and more readable copy considerably faster, like 20x faster, than my old 
xerox daisy wheel ever did.  And almost silently too, the old xerox was 
about like a distant machine gun, pervading the whole house at 40 cps.

I have probably fine tuned on it a bit since I put those scripts on my web 
page for all to use.  I can't give advice on how to make them work on 
windows, but I imagine it is possible to come up with something that would 
do that same job on windows.

That printers family is still available at Staples for a hair over a $100 
bill.  Best hundred bucks I ever spent for a printer.  Why Brother?  Their 
driver support, supports all its modes on linux, better than on windows 
even.  No other printer peddler does that as well as Brother.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS