[Coco] DriveWire printing options

[Joel Ewy]

Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> First off, Merry Christmas to everyone :)
>
> As we are finishing up a feature set for the first release of the Java
> based DriveWire server, I realize that I haven't put in anything for
> printing support yet.  I don't use printers much myself, never really
> had much need.
>
> What (if anything) would be useful to people in the printing
> department?  Options range from dumping the bytes to a text file, to
> displaying them on a web page, to even emulating some sort of Coco
> printer and rendering the output in a PDF, etc...
>
>   

Most of my printing on the CoCo was from Telewriter 64 / 128 and VED / 
VPRINT (which used similar formatting codes to Telewriter) on the 
DMP-105 and later the Star NX-1000 Rainbow.  But since that is all text, 
it would be suitable to just create a text file from it on the server 
PC.  And it's not so important to be able to print it directly anyway, 
since the original text file can simply be transferred to the PC and 
read and printed there.

I did some printing from CoCo Max and CoCo Max 3.  It would be neat to 
be able to print some of that kind of stuff.

Back in the day it was not uncommon for programs to come with 
instructions for rolling your own printer driver, or adapting a sample 
driver to your printer.  And I seem to remember that Epson-compatibility 
was a de-facto near-standard.  Maybe some kind of generic printer 
facility could be concocted that uses Epson-type codes -- not 
necessarily reflective of an exact historic printer model, but providing 
the type of functionality that could easily be adapted to work with the 
old applications.

JCE

> Anybody still print with their Coco?  If there's something that would
> be useful, let me know and I'll try to implement it.
>
> -Aaron
>
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