norlin@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu (Norman Lin) (10/23/90)
Years ago I saw an ad by, I believe, DAK Industries for a program which purportedly allowed daisy wheel printers to print graphics comparable to that produced by dot-matrix printers. The blurb said that the program used the escape codes for the printer to change the HMI (horizontal motion increment) and VMI (vertical motion increment) of the printer to fractions of inches, and then to use the "." character to place the dots on the page. Aside from a few blurry photos in the advertisement, I never saw how good this program actually was. Since then, I have never seen this program or any like it again. Are there any PD programs that do this? How difficult would it be to write one's own handler to, for instance, read in an image file from disk and print it to the printer using this method? This is, in fact, my main interest; printing out graphics files I have drawn with a paint program, downloaded, etc. I have experimented briefly with the ESC codes for my daisy wheel printer, and have indeed managed to set the HMI and VMI to smaller values, but this reduces my workspace on the page to about 2 square inches; in other words, I am increasing resolution but decreasing overall space; the printer still thinks that there are 80 characters per line, even though those 80 characters are scrunched in about 2 inches, so I can't get more than 2 inches wide on the page! Any suggestions on writing/finding such a program would be greatly appreciated. -- \ /\/\ /\/\ +-----------------------------+ /\/\ /\/\ /./ \\ /./\\\ /./\\\ /====|Norman Lin/norlin@129.15.20.2|===/./\\\ /./\\\ /./ \\\/./ \\\/./ \\\/./===| norlin@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu|====/ \\\/./ \\\/./ \/\/ \/\/ \/\/ +-----------------------------+ \/\/ \/\/
dold@mitisft.Convergent.COM (Clarence Dold) (10/23/90)
in article <1990Oct23.053846.30151@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu>, norlin@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu (Norman Lin) says: > Years ago I saw an ad by, I believe, DAK Industries for a program which > purportedly allowed daisy wheel printers to print graphics comparable to > that produced by dot-matrix printers. US Geological Survey used to use a Diablo HyType I, 20 CPS Daisy wheel, predecessor to the Diablo 630, to print maps. I suppose it worked okay, but I never paid much attention. As the hardware tech on site, I was too busy trying to keep the parts from flying off. This was around 1975, on a proprietary OS from Datapoint. -- --- Clarence A Dold - dold@tsmiti.Convergent.COM (408) 435-5293 ...pyramid!ctnews!tsmiti!dold FAX (408) 435-3105 P.O.Box 6685, San Jose, CA 95150-6685 MS#10-007
trier@cwlim.INS.CWRU.Edu (Stephen C. Trier) (10/28/90)
I wrote a screen-dump program that did this for a Swintec 8012 daisywheel
attached to my family's Color Computer. (This was a while back...)
It worked well, and generated better-looking output than many cheap dot-
matrix printers. There were several caveats.
1. It utterly *killed* the period leaf on the print wheel after a
couple of screen dumps. This was no problem, since at the time
the printer was breaking the 'g' leaf off of print wheels faster
than I could ruin '.' leaves.
2. It ate up ribbon like mad.
3. The screen dumps were INCREDIBLY slow. (Example: A dump of a
star on-screen made of exactly five line segments, only black
areas being the line segments: 20 minutes print time!)
The program itself was trivial.
I've never seen any commercial programs that could do this, and I
wouldn't recommend it. I've always wondered, though, why someone
couldn't build a 64-character vertical bit map wheel to allow dot
matrix printing, 6 bits at a time.
--
Stephen Trier Case Western Reserve University
Work: trier@cwlim.ins.cwru.edu Information Network Services
Home: sct@seldon.clv.oh.us