MarkN
#retrocomputing #daisywheel
I have a TextWriter that I love. It has a centronics port and accepts and prints raw ASCII. I used to have it booked up to a Windows pc via a usb converter and it printed just fine using the windows raw text driver.
Now I’ve moved over to Apple and it will not work, raw text drivers still send loads of format codes which it tries to print.
Any suggestions please?
Apr 8 at 4:03pmWeb
Show threadMarkNApr 8

With windows it would print whatever text there was in whatever you sent it, so it worked fine with eg. Word documents. Looking for similar functionality.

Currently thinking of setting up a small windows server to act as a print driver, and sending prints to that from the apples. Not sure if that would work…

Show threadBonkersApr 8
@markno I'd rather think in the direction of Linux
Show threadMarkNApr 9
@bonkers i found a discussion on linux (ubuntu & mint): the generic driver was deleted some time ago, it should be possible to install and old version and copy the driver from it, i didn’t have any luck with that either, but then i’m pretty new to both linux and apple having spent a corporate life on windows.
Show threadBonkersApr 9
@markno but it should be possible to just feed it ASCII text via USB. It wouldn't even need a specific driver on Linux.
Show threadMarkNApr 9
@bonkers yes, this is true. You can cat a text file to the port it’s attached to and i believe this is what most people do in this situation. I’m wanting to treat it like any other printer that you can send a document to from your normal text editor. (I don’t know enough about apple/linux to know if you can intercept that output, strip the escape codes from it and pipe it to the lpr port which could be another possible solution… )
Show threadBonkersApr 9
@markno sounds like a nice hobby project, and a way to learn Linux :)
Show threadMarkNApr 9
@bonkers thank you for the response:)