kms@ecsvax.UUCP (Ken Steele) (05/12/89)
My wish for 1.4 (and 1.3 and 1.2) is for C-A to provide a utility
that will allow the user to create his/her own printer driver.
The problem is that printers (particularly dot matrix) are constantly
being changed/modified/tweaked by the manufacturers. The current
method by C-A for providing drivers often means that if you don't
have an official driver then you are plagued by missing or incorrect
commands and are, otherwise, generally out of luck.
For example, I have an Okidata 192 (IBM version). This is not a rare
printer. But I have been unable to find a driver that supports all its
features AND doesn't attempt unrecognized features.
When I write, I produce 50-page documents which need to follow
rather specific page-formatting rules. Because I have to use
whatever printer is available, this means that I have had to stick with
the IBM for such work because on it each piece of software provides drivers
(and periodic updates to incorporate new printers).
I follow the reasoning of C-A's approach to driver issues, and have
no quarrel about that. However the approach means that C-A needs to
provide some easier mechanism, than having to write your own printer
driver, to allow incorporation of the wide variety of printers.
One suggestion: Since so many of the printer command sets are variations
of a few basic themes, then perhaps a few skeleton drivers could be
provided along with a patching program for specific user needs. Such
drivers may not be as powerful/efficient as a from-scratch driver but
would allow the user to "get by."
--
Ken Steele Dept. of Psychology kms@ecsvax.[bitnet | UUCP]
Mars Hill College
Mars Hill, NC 28754 dwl10@uts.amdahl.com (Dave Lowrey) (05/12/89)
In article <6984@ecsvax.UUCP> kms@ecsvax.UUCP (Ken Steele) writes: > > > >My wish for 1.4 (and 1.3 and 1.2) is for C-A to provide a utility >that will allow the user to create his/her own printer driver. > Fish Disk #60 has a program called PrtDrvGen. It will do exactly what you have asked for. -- "What is another word | Dave Lowrey | [The opinions expressed MAY be for 'Thesaurus'?" | Amdahl Corp. | those of the author and are not | Houston, Texas | necessarily those of his Steven Wright | amdahl!dwl10 | employer] (`nuff said!)
daveb@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Berezowski) (05/12/89)
In article <6984@ecsvax.UUCP> kms@ecsvax.UUCP (Ken Steele) writes: > > > >My wish for 1.4 (and 1.3 and 1.2) is for C-A to provide a utility >that will allow the user to create his/her own printer driver. > >The problem is that printers (particularly dot matrix) are constantly >being changed/modified/tweaked by the manufacturers. The current >method by C-A for providing drivers often means that if you don't >have an official driver then you are plagued by missing or incorrect >commands and are, otherwise, generally out of luck. > >For example, I have an Okidata 192 (IBM version). This is not a rare >printer. But I have been unable to find a driver that supports all its >features AND doesn't attempt unrecognized features. > >When I write, I produce 50-page documents which need to follow >rather specific page-formatting rules. Because I have to use >whatever printer is available, this means that I have had to stick with >the IBM for such work because on it each piece of software provides drivers >(and periodic updates to incorporate new printers). > >I follow the reasoning of C-A's approach to driver issues, and have >no quarrel about that. However the approach means that C-A needs to >provide some easier mechanism, than having to write your own printer >driver, to allow incorporation of the wide variety of printers. > >One suggestion: Since so many of the printer command sets are variations >of a few basic themes, then perhaps a few skeleton drivers could be >provided along with a patching program for specific user needs. Such >drivers may not be as powerful/efficient as a from-scratch driver but >would allow the user to "get by." > A printer driver generator can be written to support the text mode of a printer (in fact there is such a beast called PrtDrvGen on one of the Fish disks although the number escapes me at present). This program was written to the V1.2 printer driver standard; I had hoped that the author would upgrade it to the V1.3 standard. You should be able to use this tool to modify your Okidata_293I driver. A printer driver generator for the graphics side is much more difficult if not near impossible. Each different printer has so many quirks when it comes to the graphics side that the possibilities are almost endless. I know that an 8-pin non-color graphics generator is possible (I've seen it, but not for the Amiga), but it is very limited in its scope. Commodore-Amiga makes available a document on how to write your own printer driver along with sample source code. Contact our CATS dept. at (215) 431-9180 for more info (I believe that you need to be either a certified or commercial developer to get this, but I'm not sure). Good luck. Regards, David Berezowski
kms@ecsvax.UUCP (Ken Steele) (05/13/89)
In article <6850@cbmvax.UUCP>, daveb@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Berezowski) writes: > In article <6984@ecsvax.UUCP> kms@ecsvax.UUCP (Ken Steele) writes: > > > > > > > >My wish for 1.4 (and 1.3 and 1.2) is for C-A to provide a utility > >that will allow the user to create his/her own printer driver. > > > > > > > A printer driver generator can be written to support the text mode > of a printer (in fact there is such a beast called PrtDrvGen on one of the > Fish disks although the number escapes me at present). This program was > written to the V1.2 printer driver standard; I had hoped that the author > would upgrade it to the V1.3 standard. You should be able to use this > tool to modify your Okidata_293I driver. > I did use PDG. It was written in Modula-2 by a Danish CS student, and so I was forced to consult RKM and make translation/guesses at a foreign CS student's attempts to describe something in English. This is not the way you encourage people to rush out and buy hardware. > A printer driver generator for the graphics side is much more > difficult if not near impossible. Each different printer has so many > quirks when it comes to the graphics side that the possibilities are > almost endless. I know that an 8-pin non-color graphics generator is > possible (I've seen it, but not for the Amiga), but it is very limited > in its scope. > And this is where I gave up with PDG. I couldn't tell whether I had missed something because of his unfamiliarity with English, my unfamiliarity with CS-dept terminology, or my unfamiliarty with Modula-2, or whatever. > Commodore-Amiga makes available a document on how to write your > own printer driver along with sample source code. Contact our CATS dept. > at (215) 431-9180 for more info (I believe that you need to be either a > certified or commercial developer to get this, but I'm not sure). > Gosh (faint hearts tread no further :-)) David this is where I lose my cookies. I have an epson-of-the-week. The official approach of CBM is to say (both to developers and users) that CBM provides drivers (in /devs). But, in practice, there seems to be no stated decision rule for either what should or should not be supported. In practice, there is no official policy for updating/enlarging the printer driver selection (with the exception of new OS versions). New OS versions appear every 1.3 years or so, but printers change at a faster rate. And the upshot is that, if I am a registered developer, I might get a code-example to write a driver. And CBM expects to lure in John Q. Blue and John Q. Apple with the promise of the thrill of writing a printer driver!!!! (faint hearts take a sip of chamomille tea, it is all over, wheww :-)) > Good luck. > > Regards, David Berezowski Thanks for the reply -- Ken Steele Dept. of Psychology kms@ecsvax.[bitnet | UUCP] Mars Hill College Mars Hill, NC 28754
daveb@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Berezowski) (05/13/89)
Ken, we do the best we can with the limited resources we have [ one person :^( ]. When I wrote the 1.3 drivers I contacted ALL the major printer manufacturers and got their latest printers. I am also on their list of 'preferred developers' so I get advanced information on their products and will put in support for printers/options that the end-user may not even be aware about. However, new printers do come out faster than our O/S releases and yes it is hard to keep up. I wish I had the resources to write a printer driver generator (for the text commands at least) but alas I do not. If you are a developer then you can get the EpsonX and EpsonQ source code as part of the "How to Write a Printer Driver' package. I suspect that in your case its simply a matter of adding/changing one (or two) escape sequences and re-compiling. Perhaps some kind sole will take the lead from the V1.2 printer driver generator and re-code it in 'C' and in English, and put it on the public domain Fish disks. If anyone wants to take this on, I'd be happy to work with them for the benefit of the Amiga community. I do sympathize with you and wish I could help more. Hey, we're REAL busy guys! :^) Good luck! If there is any specific feature you feel is missing from any of our supported drivers, please email me the specifics and I'll look at it for the V1.4 release. Regards, David Berezowski
usenet@cps3xx.UUCP (Usenet file owner) (05/14/89)
In article <6863@cbmvax.UUCP> daveb@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Berezowski) writes: > > If there is any specific feature you feel is missing from any of >our supported drivers, please email me the specifics and I'll look at it >for the V1.4 release. > > Regards, David Berezowski Dave, Something that is very much missing is unsupported feature emulation. If a particular printer does not support a feature, say leftmargin set, then the driver should emulate that feature. Since the drives don't do this, it would be silly for a program to use any of these features that might not work. Doing this would of course make the "generic" printer driver one of the hardest. It could then be simplified for smart printers by removeing the emulation stuff. Another nice thing would be a "preview" driver, which would support text and graphics features in a window on screen. Oh, I think youall have done a very good job with the 1.3 drivers! This is an example of a short .signature jap@frith.cl.msu.edu
kms@ecsvax.UUCP (Ken Steele) (05/14/89)
In article <6863@cbmvax.UUCP>, daveb@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Berezowski) writes: > > I wish I had the resources to write a printer driver generator > (for the text commands at least) but alas I do not. > > Perhaps some kind sole will take the lead from the V1.2 printer > driver generator and re-code it in 'C' and in English, and put it on > the public domain Fish disks. If anyone wants to take this on, I'd be > happy to work with them for the benefit of the Amiga community. > A sole soul on printer driver duty. I sympathize very seriously. If a wizard would agree to try it, for it is beyond my ken ;-), with your help, then I would agree to serve as a testing coordinator; and find the people, send out the program, collect complaints, organize them, etc. So that hassle wouldn't be on your back. -- Ken Steele Dept. of Psychology kms@ecsvax.[bitnet | UUCP] Mars Hill College Mars Hill, NC 28754
jms@tardis.Tymnet.COM (Joe Smith) (05/14/89)
In article <47xA02P525zb01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> dwl10@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Dave Lowrey) writes: >>My wish for 1.4 (and 1.3 and 1.2) is for C-A to provide a utility >>that will allow the user to create his/her own printer driver. >> >Fish Disk #60 has a program called PrtDrvGen. It will do exactly what >you have asked for. I agree, if you make it: "will probably do everything you need". Before I finally found a driver for DEC's LA50, I tried to build one using PrtDrvGen 2.3 from Amicus disk #22. I typed in all the specs for the escape sequences, and then found that there was no way to tell the program how to do sixel graphics. There were options for horizontal pixels versus vertical pixels, and how many pixels per character, but the killer was in specifying what to do with the rest of the bits in the byte. PrtDrvGen gave me 4 options: bits + 0 use 6 LSBs, remaining high bits off bits + 0xC0 use 6 LSBs, remaining high bits on bits*4 + 0 use 6 MSBs, remaining low bits off bits*4 + 3 use 6 MSBs, remaining low bits on Sixel graphics require bits+63, which was not one of the options. (I didn't send in the shareware fee to get sources to PrtDrvGen since I knew the driver I needed was out there, somewhere.) I eventually found an LA50 driver on a disk from Sacramento, they may have gotten it from CompuServe. Other than not handling one incompatible printer, it looked like a very good program. -- Joe Smith (408)922-6220 | SMTP: JMS@F74.TYMNET.COM or jms@tymix.tymnet.com McDonnell Douglas FSCO | UUCP: ...!{ames,pyramid}!oliveb!tymix!tardis!jms PO Box 49019, MS-D21 | PDP-10 support: My car's license plate is "POPJ P," San Jose, CA 95161-9019 | narrator.device: "I didn't say that, my Amiga did!"
doug@xdos.UUCP (Doug Merritt) (05/14/89)
In article <6863@cbmvax.UUCP> daveb@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Berezowski) writes: > Perhaps some kind sole will take the lead from the V1.2 printer ^^^^ >driver generator and re-code it in 'C' and in English, and put it on If this is a reference to Fred Fish, I think he's probably busy enough already. Yuk, yuk. Urk. Ok, ok...a bad pun. Sorry. This is a good point, though. It seems like a good thing for CBM to support, in an ideal world. What are the chances of doing so in 1.4? I would think that it would be worthwhile to cut the list of CBM supported printers drastically, and instead put the effort into providing open ended support via that CBM-supported printer driver generator. There's always going to be more printers than you can directly support, so this would be the technically "right" way to do it. Doug -- Doug Merritt {pyramid,apple}!xdos!doug doug@xdos.com Member, Crusaders for a Better Tomorrow Professional Wildeyed Visionary "Of course, I'm no rocket scientist" -- Randell Jesup, Capt. Boinger Corps