Continuous feed dot matrix printers

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 09:14:53PM -0600, Alan Jackson wrote:
>I support some software on CPAN that builds mailing labels in PostScript.
>
>I just got a query from a fellow who has a continuous-feed tractor printer
>(an Okidata) who wants to print labels on it from Linux.
>
>I think I gave away my old dot matrix a few years ago so I can't do any
>testing. I suspect that creating a postscript file is probably not the way
>to handle a continous feed printer - probably just want to send it raw
>printing commands and text. Does anyone have experience with continuous
>feed on Linux? How does it work? What sort of drivers do you need? Am I
>making this too complicated?

Yup.

I don't know about CUPS and the other fancy stuff, but printing
text under normal *ix is just a matter of a filter that basically
sends the input directly to the printer without massaging it at
all.  Typically pages are 66 lines of ascii text, and most of the
Okidata printers can also set other page lengths so you can use
the FF (form feed, ctrl-L) character to jump to the top of form.

Printing labels is just a matter of formatting ascii text into columns with
the right number of lines in each label.  The default setting on the Oki is
most like 6lpi (lines per inch).

You can get a lot fancier with laser labels.  There I usually typeset them
with groff into multi columns to get pretty text and decent fonts.

Bill
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