Retro printer day: I have an old IbmPro compatible dot matrix printer connected by a USB parallel adapter to my Ubuntu 20.04 system. It works great! One major trick in setting it up: set the URI to /dev/usb/lp0 and make sure the lp user is in the right group to write to that dev. That took me a while to figure out. I use the IBMPro generic printer driver and it's great. Other critical hints: 9600 baud, 8 bits, no stop bit, hardware flow control.
The one remaining problem: the print area is offset about 0.5" to the left. I'm sure I know what's going on: the tractor feed area is about 0.5" and so I need to somehow indicate, don't count the tractor feed area within the page margin. In other words, the full page width is about 9.5" but only print 8.5" of that and offset it 0.5" to the right.
I've tried editing the PPD file including changing the values in HWMargins and ParamCustomPageSize WidthOffset. None of this seems to have any impact. I've read a bunch of documentation about PPD files and it's just not clear what to do. I guess I could set up a custom paper size of 9.5" width but I would prefer to just have all my documents be the same and print correctly by offsetting everything as it's generating printer output.
There must be a simple setting for this.
Edit: tried a lot more things including:
Go to Printer Properties and go to Job Options. There's a left margin setting. I set it to 36 points, or half an inch, and that moved printing over. Adjust as desired. But that didn't work. I also tried to make this change in the PPD:
ImageableArea Letter/US Letter: "18 36 612 756"
and that didn't work.
It is fixed. The order of parameters for the gs line in the PPD must be just right and it's not obvious how to get it working. After much trial and error, this line works:
*FoomaticRIPCommandLine: "gs -q -dBATCH -dPARANOIDSAFER -dQUIET -dNOPAUSE &&
-dNOMEDIAATTRS -dNOINTERPOLATE -sDEVICE=ibmpro%A%Z &&
-sOutputFile=- &&
-c "<</PageOffset [36 0]>> setpagedevice" -f -"
It must be in exactly that order. Adjust the offset values (36 for the horizontal offset, 0 for vertical, in this case) as needed. This really should have been easier, given that it's going to be quite normal to adjust offsets on any dot matrix printer. I hope this question is useful for anyone else in this situation. Yes do pay attention to the HTML escapes used in the line above, they are correct. I tried before using ' and that didn't work. It must be ".
This was really a lot of effort to figure out although would probably be obvoius to someone experienced in PPD files.
Related
I have a problem that I can't seem to get rid of.
When a customer of mine prints a specific QRP, he gets a "WARNING. This report may extend beyond the printer page margins. Text may be clipped, depending on the printer in use. Do you wish to continue?"
While of course in no way critical, it's a problem due to the sheer number of prints per day this customer has, having to confirm this dialog every time.
I've had this issue before and seemed to be able to fix it by setting the report format to "Custom", but I've recently updated the QRP and the problem is back despite being still set to "Custom". I have also tried A4 (which is the printer's standard page format) and A5, to no avail.
Is there maybe a way to suppress this error in code?
The report itself is way smaller than A4 (it's an A5 format packaging label) so there is no way it would lead to any problems with the print margins, and the prints do come out perfectly fine.
You can use the constant RPT_PrintNoWarn along with SalReportPrint function. The constant is used for suppressing warnings about margin overflow and tiled pages.
It can be combained with constant RPT_PrintNoErrors using pipe symbol.
SalReportPrint ( hWndFrm, strTemplate, strVariables, strInputs, nCopies, RPT_PrintNoWarn|RPT_PrintNoErrors, nFirstPage, nLastPage, nErr )
I have an SQL assignment for UNI due in a couple days. I played around with SQL settings using the 'set' command and I have messed up the output of queries (see screenshots, link below).
The output seems to be writing to a fixed line length, instead of using the full length of the terminal console. I am using tmux in iterm v3.2 but also have the same issue on the native MAC OSX terminal.
Is there a way to reset these settings to default? Or somehow make it work for me? I just want the lines to be displayed to the right side of the screen, until it needs to be wrapped.
Let me know if this is a dupe.
Got it!
This is controlled by the pagesize environment variable.
For the screenshot I had pagesize set to 14. Which means print 14 lines, with a blank line for the 14th line, before printing the rest of the output.
I changed the pagesize value to 200, this should be enough for what I need.
set pagesize n
help set
I am using CUPS with the printer driver which use "application/vnd.cups-raster 10 rastertopj" and i am trying to get the look of dither 4x4 print/output but i am clueless where to change the setting for choosing different dithering/halftoning pattern..
i also contacted the cups and they said dithering is done by the driver and also told that If the driver is Ghostscript-based you may be able to change the dither as you’d like, and yes this is indeed Ghostscript-based printer driver/filter cause when i open .PPD file i see *Product: "(ESP Ghostscript)".
Can you please guide me on how or where to change the dither of the printer filter/driver?
Edited:
this is the halftone output its printing: https://imgur.com/a/18hkC1H or https://imgur.com/download/7pTksX4
this is the output i am looking for: https://imgur.com/a/KZTQrkp or https://imgur.com/download/5FnpKEM
Thankyou
Ghostscript supports the full range of halftoning defined in the PostScript Language Reference Manual. It also has its own stochastic screening code.
To change the screening, you put the relevant commands in the PostScript file. If you are starting with a PostScript program, then that's where you put the screening. Otherwise you'll have to inject it into the PostScript, which is where you modify the PPD file.
I can't tell you how to do that (because its a CUPS thing, not Ghostscript), nor can I tell you what the PostScript you need is (because I have no idea what the screen you want looks like), you'll have to experiment to match the output you want (note that halftoning is not the same as dithering). Worst case you can use a type 3 halftone dictionary which should produce something similar to what you want, at the cost of needing a lot of data to set it up.
<<
/HalftoneType 1
/Frequency 37
/Angle 45
/SpotFunction {180 mul cos
exch 180 mul cos
add 2 div}
>> sethalftone
For what its worth, the above is a type 1 halftone dictionary defining a round spot shape and with what I beleive are 'reasonable' values for a 300 dpi monochrome output device.
As to how you get that into the PostScript that Cups sends to Ghostscript, or onto the Ghostscript command line, I can't tell you.
I'm using wxMaxima 16.12.0 (Maxima 5.39.0) and when I try to print the output, I get overlapping text.
Here's an example (please, ignore the fact the the command couldn't be correct)
1st image
Sometimes happens also with print and printf (inside a block)
2nd image
printf(true, "Link ~d~%", i),
print("+------------------------------------------------+"),
3rd image
But outside a block
4th image
This makes all the output completely unreadable, and my program heavy relies on it. I think that in the 3rd image, the problem is that there is the 2 at the denominator is causing the "shrinking" of the output.
How can I solve it? Is it my problem or Maxima's?
OS: Mint 18 sarah
Kernel: x86_64 Linux 4.4.0-57-generic
DE: Cinnamon 3.0.7
P.S. I also noticed that sometimes, re-running previous commands could make "readable" the following, but that always happens random
EDIT1: I noticed that the last packages that I installed are
libwxbase3.0-dev
libwxgtk3.0-dev
libwxgtk3.0-0v5
libwxbase3.0-0v5
Could it be that there's some kind of conflict?
EDIT2: if I cut the command, the output is "reorganized" in a decent way
become
As BillThePlatypus requested, I'll answer so that everyone will have a quick solution.
In my case, just changing the font solved the problem (i.e. no more overlapping prints), so give it a try.
I need to use maxima software to deal with data. I try to read data from a text file constructed as
1 2 3
11 22 33
ect.
Following comands allow for loading data sufficiently.
load(numericalio);
read_matrix("path to the file");
The problem arises when I apply them to a more realistic (larger) data set. In this case the message appears Expression longer than allowed by the configuration setting.
How to overcome this problem? I cannot see any option in configuration menu. I would be grateful for advice.
I ran into the same error message today, at it seems to be related to the size of the output that wxMaxima receives from the Maxima executable.
If you wish to display the output regardless, you can change it in the configuration here:
Edit>Configure>Worksheet>Show long expressions
Note that showing a massive expression or amount of data may dramatically slow the program down, so consider hiding the output (use a $ instead of a ; at the end of your lines) if you don't need to visualize the data.