[Coco] DriveWire printing options

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 25 December 2009, Torsten Dittel wrote:
>Well, if you ask, I assume most CoCo Apps would natively support a
>9-needle printer like the Epson FX85. Would be nice to be able to create
>  a PDF (or any other Bitmap format, e.g. a G4 TIFF) output file from
>what's send to the CoCo's bit banger port. Emulation would be a little
>bit more tricky because we did a lot of strange things especially to
>print graphics with improved results: Single, double and multi strike,
>micro shifts, density and directionality changes and so on. Would be
>nice to emulate all these impacts on the actuall print e.g. with grey
>scales. I remember an application which was able to display and print
>Mac-format pictures, and I had written an improved printer driver
>section supporting all the gimmicks of the FX-85+. to allow high quality
>at least quad density prints...
>
>OK, just dreaming, Merry X-mas to everybody out there!
>
Well, one possibility, IF you don't mind a boatload of editing of the text 
file you are going to send, and IF you are running linux, AND have those 
scripts I posted yesterday installed & running, (That is a bunch of 'if's and 
'and's though) would be to add the markups that pf used for such things to 
the text file, and then print it with pf.  It would not, I don't think, do me 
a lot of good with the laser, but using an inkjet or impact printer, you 
should be able to see some of the effects unless gs filters out the 
backspaces pf uses to do the over-strikes.  However, because that old xerox 
1650-ro I was using 15 years ago could not do the micro-offsets to give a 
true bold appearance, I settled for doing 3 overstrikes, which did make it 
noticeably darker.

I haven't even tried to print a vef, gif or tiff with this setup as that 
would no doubt take a considerably smarter cocod, to inspect the file and 
then send lp the appropriate options to print it.  Such files as generated on 
more modern machines probably have a header that identifies the file, a 
MIMETYPE if you will, but I believe the coco relied on the .xxx extension, 
and as it is, 'list'ing a file to /p, does not send a header line containing 
the file name and its identifying characteristics.

Maybe we need a substitute for the list command that co-operates with a newly 
enhanced cocod?  Or, better yet, a /p driver that does it automatically?  
That is currently scbbp.  However, since at present, my machine suffers the 
dreaded error 237 at the drop of just one or 2 processes (we seem to have 
lost some system memory over time, I can recall when I had a 36k kilobyte 
os9boot file, now its 32680 bytes and did not suffer from that often enough 
to get my attention, now its less and I can't format a floppy cuz there only 
7k total, in 2 pieces, I need to remove the 2nd utils file load I suppose)
But I just looked scbbp.asm over, cleaning up all the trailing blank space as 
I went, and I don't think modifying it is the right thing to do, which leaves 
a pipe function.  I'll investigate that option if there is any real interest, 
so far Bruce C. is the only one with a question about the cocod/coco_print I 
posted yesterday.  This time I hope with enough setup & installation data 
that it would be usable to all who have the hardware (a linux box) to make 
use of it.

Maybe I'm the oddball here (been accused of it many many times), but when the 
coco got too small, and I was being exposed to the amiga's we had bought for 
graphics work at the tv station, and because I was by then so used to 
multitasking, it was natural to buy myself one.  The only windows install 
that was ever within this house that actually belonged to me was XP on the 
laptop I bought to use while out on a job someplace, and it has long since 
been erased by a mandriva install.  So the only M$ authored software here is 
whatever may be in the roms of my coco's (several) or, slim chance at best, 
in the roms of an atari ST I fumbled into possession of at a cocofest (one of 
Ron's up in PA) quite a few years ago.  In fact I have a certain pride in not 
having any working winderz installs on the property. :) And I intend to keep 
it that way.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)

we just switched to FDDI.