cheshire@neon.Stanford.EDU (Stuart David Cheshire) (04/11/91)
When I first had a Mac, I had an Epson printer, which Apple do not support, so I wrote an INIT which translated the Imagewriter LQ control codes to the control codes which the Epson uses, and it worked very well. This is basically what Grappler does, but it wasn't around then. Grappler also requires extra hardware hanging out the the back of the printer, and an extra power supply. Recently Apple launched the new StyleWriter, a 360 dpi printer. It is based on the Canon BJ10e BubbleJet mechanism and even looks very similar, but Apple have again changed the control codes so that the driver will not work with a normal Canon BJ10e. I have altered my original INIT to translate the StyleWriter driver's control codes back into Canon control codes before sending it down the serial port to the printer, and this seem to work very well too. I have also put in an option to translate the codes to 24pin Epson, since if you do two passes of the print head, that printer is theoretically capable of 360x360 dpi too. HP LaserJet and HP DeskJet printers can do 300dpi which is not quite as good, but by scaling down the StyleWriter 360dpi bitmap by a factor of 6/5 I can make them work fine and get pretty good results on them too. The new program still supports ImageWriter LQ emulation so if you don't have the StyleWriter driver it still works, although the resolution is not so high, and this is the way it drives 9-pin printers to produce a fairly impressive looking 216 dpi on those printers. (They cannot possibly to emulate the 360 dpi StyleWriter, so I didn't try.) I am now looking for people to beta test the INIT for me. I want a few people for each of the following categories of printer: 1. 9-pin Epson or compatible. 2. 24-pin Epson or compatible. 3. Canon BJ10e or compatible (BJ130 etc). 4. HP LaserJet. 5. HP DeskJet. You will need some kind of serial interface or adapter for the printer, which I am afraid I cannot afford to supply if you do not already have one. I can recommend the JFT Paralink which costs about $75 from Epson, and runs at 57600 baud which gives good printing speed on these high resolution printers. Please reply by e-mail to: Stuart Cheshire (cheshire@cs.stanford.edu)