*BSD News Article 96616


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From: wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu (Bill Paul)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Printing graphics on old Epson FX-80?
Date: 31 May 1997 16:42:57 GMT
Organization: Columbia University Center for Telecommunications Research
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Daring to challenge the will of the almighty Leviam00se, Conrad Sabatier
(conrads@neosoft.com) had the courage to say:

: OK, I *should* probably buy a new printer.  :-)  But just wondering if
: it's possible to get this old non-Postscript Epson dot-matrix printer to
: do graphics.

: I've got it setup for text, no problem.  But all of the filters I've
: explored seem to require a Postscript-compatible printer.  True?

: -- 
: Conrad Sabatier
: http://www.neosoft.com/~conrads

Yes, true. _But_ you can use ghostscript to translate PostScript into
a format that your printer will understand, and then dump the result
to /dev/lpt0. I have an old Star Micronics SG10 printer (which can be
coerced into believing it's an IBM ProPrinter) that is supported by
one of ghostscript's printer drivers. And I have sucessfully used it
to print graphics and other postscript documents from FreeBSD using
ghostscript as a filter. Ghostscript has support for both 9-pin and
24-pin dot matrix Epson printers.

The bad news: I don't remember if the ghostscript binary package in
the ports collection has epson support compiled in by default.

The good news: it's not hard to compile gs with epson support yourself.

-Bill

--
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-Bill Paul            (212) 854-6020 | System Manager, Master of Unix-Fu
Work:         wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu | Center for Telecommunications Research
Home:  wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu | Columbia University, New York City
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