Is there anyone that could give some proper guideness in Printing Reports (e.g. XtraReports)
in Dot Matrix Printers? Or any information printing in Dot Matrix Printers. Can i just print the report as i could print in InkJet/Laser printers? Should i use Stream to LPT1, export the report as RTF and print as bytes[]? Use Escape Codes? Any info for the above targeting C# .NET? I should handle printing my business object for every property to a specific location? HOW?
If it were me (and 20 years ago it would have been) I'd concentrate on writing the document in GDI properly as a good, well-structured C# program. From there Windows can render it onscreen or to just about any printer you've got drivers for.
Let Windows worry about the print drivers for actually rendering the GDI document onto paper and handling system things like what port it's connected to (USB, Parallel, etc..) and all of the nasty protocol details.
Please don't wire things to "LPT1", "COM" ports or any of that crap. Your admins and future users of your software will hate you for it.
Related
Using DDS I know I can print a box and color it in using the the BOX keyword:
A R BOX5 BOX(2.5 0.5 5.1 6.3 0.2 +
A (*COLOR *HIGHLIGHT 3 75)
Is there something similar to create a circle?
According to the DDS Reference: No. I can't find any keywords to directly draw a circle.
My guess is that back in the heyday of high volume impact printers, there was no fast way to print such circles. Note: Impact isn't necessarily the same as dot-matrix printers. Lines were possible with special characters, though. The "language" to steer such a printer was called SCS (SNA Character String).
But you can create a circle as desired with external programs, convert the result to a page segment, using specialized IBM software, and load that via DDS onto a page. See the PAGSEG keyword on the linked documentation for information and caveats. Especially the need to use AFP might pose a serious obstacle. (AFP is — overly simplified and thus not entirely correct — like PCL or PostScript, a page description language. IPDS can be roughly seen as equivalent to PJL.) Ricoh printers sometimes have native IPDS/AFP support. Also, there were some manufacturers for converter boxes, faking an SCS or even IPDS/AFP printer to the host side, and appearing as a PJL/PCL printer data generator to the printer.
The built-in Host Print Transform feature which can be enabled for printer devices converts the spooled output to PCL, so it can be sent to stock printers. The drawback is, it uses local CPU resources which might not be desired. Older releases of the OS might only support SCS with Host Print Transform.
Newer IBM I releases include InfoPrint Server, a java-based background task enabling to convert print jobs on the machine to PDF. I assume this should work with AFP. Not talking about resource usage, though…
Printing on IBM i is a deep rabbit hole in itself. See the accompanying documentation.
I have written a printing application that works well. I can write files, update settings and do most all functionality from one console. But one aspect of the program has eluded me for quite a while: the ability to read the Zebra register/configuration values.
It would be good to periodically be able to read the values on the Zebra and compare them to default known good standards and to be able to reset them if necessary.
Currently, in order to see these values, I need to either use the built-in web page (networked printers only), print a report, or scroll through the printer interface. What I really need to is a method to be able to read these registers values and create a known good setup file.
Has anyone been able to find any SDK or trick to read these values using .NET (C# or vb.Net)?
The application is a windows desktop utility used on my shop floor and I communicate with the printers using either LPT and ethernet interfaces (as applicable).
I would recommend checking out the Zebra Link-OS SDK which has a lot of functionality when it comes to what you can do with Zebra printers. Specifically they have a section titled "Getting all printer settings and their configuration". However the code example they provide will not work unless your printer is a Link-OS enabled printer. If that happens to be the case then great! If not you can use the SGD class within the Zebra.SDK.Printer namespace to use Set-Get-Do commands to retrieve and change information. More information on SGD can be found in this ZPL manual under the SGD Printer Commands section.
I am looking into a way to manipulate the data sent to a printer (inkjet for now. Probably an HP 2460).
I want to change the data dynamically each time the printer tries to print.
Ie. at point 1, the print will be of the page kept normally, but the paper might change its position, so I am looking for a way to rotate the input image to counter the rotation of the paper.
I think I am looking for a way to specify the data to be printed pixel by pixel in real time.
Data input available :
rotation
position of the print head with respect to the corner of the page at
each instant provided in real time
What I have so far:
I have seen one instance where a particular HP inkjet was modified to work directly off an arduino but I would like to do it directly from the computer for now for 2 reasons:
I need to submit a proof of concept system as soon as possible
I don't have much easy access to logic analyser/scope to reverse
engineer the communication protocol (nor probably the expertise).
I am looking into PostScript, GhostScript but from what I understand so far, I wont be able to modify the data dynamically (Still trying to figure it out, so pardon me if I'm wrong). Would this approach work? Or do I need to look into drivers or something else?
I am aware of the restrictions of asking questions and how ill-researched questions are frowned upon. I am still trying to figure out how to get this done and have been looking into all the things that came up in my mind and I am coming across while looking through. But, so far, whatever I've seen doesn't seem to be capable of doing what I want (or I'm missing it). I'm asking this question in the hope of getting some pointers as to what to look into.
if you mean to manipulate each page, ie this page landscape next page portrait, etc then i would work on the postscript input, and not even think about the specific hardware communications.
On the other hand you want to grab the print head and manipulate things real time after printing has started then the approach will obviously depend on the specific printer.
I would try to do this at a higher level if possible. Best would be if you take control of how the postscript is being generated, then you can insert <<...>> setpagedevice to change printer parameters.
One problem is that most printer manufacturers have stopped distributing documentation on the printer command language.
Another problems is ghostscript output devices are hopelessly out of date, like dot matrix printers. (see problem one).
For a screen printing output application, I reverse engineered the epson 1400 print command language and wrote a program to output a bitmap to the printer. Then I wrote a ghostscript printdriver based on a .bmp driver which created bitmaps and converted the bitmap to epson commands. Since you want to use an HP, this code unfortunately won't help.
Having gone down that road, I can tell you it isn't easy. Inkjet's don't allow rotation, so you'd need to rasterize the inkjet, then re-create a rotated image. Ghostscript is itself tricky to get running to a printer using gsprint and redmon, but if you already have postscript job that prints upright, then the image can be rotated and shifted with postscript commands.
I don't understand what you are trying to accomplish. Can you use a pc with a webcam to preview the orientation, then generate a bitmap and print it to the printer or do you need to wait till the paper is in position before generating the print data?
I have a piece of equipment from the late 1980s. It outputs text and graphics directly to dot matrix and Laserjet III printers. These are starting to be harder to find. I would like to implement a solution which allows me to connect to the computer and "print" to it (a piece of software) then print it to a modern printer or .pdf file. I can't locate the piece of software that would accept the input of the device and emulate an old printer. Any solutions??? Thanks for any help. I know this isn't exactly what most of you do, but I'm hoping someone has had need of something similar in their experience.
It already exists. It's called PrintCapture and sells for US$97.00. You will need the necessary interface hardware as well, depending on which type of printer port the device has; they list some of those devices on their web site under the "Details" section.
We are making a lab instrument using an ARM9/RTOS system. The client has asked about printing simple reports from the ARM9 system. In this case, we have USB Host support in the RTOS. I'm thinking about printing bitmaps in generic PCL, hoping that will cover the widest range of printers. Is there a better way to approach this? I'm assuming the RTOS does not have printer drivers, and I don't want to support a lot of printers.
We also support USB device mode on our system, so you could plug in a photo printer, and our device would appear to be a USB stick. So that would work, but it's a bit clunky. This will be a C/C++ embedded system
Pretending to be a digital camera and interfacing with a PictBridge printer actually sounds pretty clever. It would remove the need to deal with different printer drivers, and if my understanding of the technology is correct, you could even control the operation of the printer right from your device.
On the other hand, as someone who has used a fair number of computerized lab instruments (oscilloscopes etc.) I find the ability to save screenshots from an ethernet/web interface to be much more useful. Print is dead.
Have you looked at what all the scope vendors are doing? They all have print options (I think) and I don't know what they are doing to solve this problem.
Last time I was involved with something like this, we used serial ports to talk to HP printers using PCL. That backfired as everyone quickly stopped making serial printers!
PostScript is natively supported by most printers, so you could just send it over the wire, but it would be a lot more cumbersome than straight ASCII. There are libraries, but they're bulky.
Since your device can appear to be a USB stick, a simple solution would be to generate a report as a JPEG image and then have the printer open and print it. This way, the people who want paperless output can use the image as-is, and everyone else can print it.
If I understand you correctly, you could write a formatted text file and do a "print" command through Windows in the "usb stick" mode.
For a simple report, it would be best to stick to straight ASCII. If you need some graphics, PCL would be a good choice for B/W laser printers, but I'm not sure how universal it would be for the more common ink-jet printers.
Edit: the PCL Reference Manual is available as a PDF from HP.