[Coco] Printing from DW

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 25 October 2014 21:35:53 Nick Marentes did opine
And Gene did reply:
> Firstly... I've tried looking at the drivewire settings and the WIKI
> but cannot see/understand how I'm suppose to print via drivewire.
> 
> I have a standard CoCo3 connected to my PC drivewire server. Everything
> is working fine as far as file transfering goes.
> 
> Printing is set to TEXT but where does the printout go?

Depends on which printer driver and descriptor is in your bootfile.
> 
> Where do I tell drivewire what my printer serial rate is?
You don't for drivewire, because printing is just another channel in the 
protocol.
> 
> My idea of how printing is meant to work is that I merely print from
> the CoCo and drivewire intercepts the serial data and writes a text
> file or creates an image to a location of my choosing.
> 
> Ideally, it would be nice if it translated the printer data into
> whatever printer is attached to the PC and it print directly. Nice and
> user friendly.
> 
> Am I viewing the world in rose colored glasses?
> 
> Tell me if  I'm being stupid and acting like a C64 user.

A wee bit perhaps. ;-)

I have some bash scripts in use here, that take what I send to the /p that 
is setup in the bootfile as a drivewire channel.  In drivewire, I have it 
intercept that data and write it to a file, raw just like the coco sent 
it.

One of the accessories to the script is a setup of inotifywait, one of 
linux's handier little utils, watching the location directory drivewire 
saves the file in.  When a file is closed, complete IOW, inotifywait sends 
my script a message containing the hashed name of the new file.  My script 
then scans the old jobs directory, deletes the oldest of 25 files, renames 
the just saved file according to my bookkeeping scheme, and saves it in a 
second scratch directory, then issues an
"lp -dBROTHEHL2140 new name of file".

Cups then processes the text, rendering it for that printer and sending it 
back down the cable to a hub on the coco3 desk which has this printer 
sitting on the top shelf.  Its a B&W laser, costs about a 100 $ bill, does 
19 pages a minute, and its warming up the drum about 5 seconds after I get 
my prompt back on the coco from having typed "list filename >/p".

Fastest printer I've ever had on my coco's, and since its a 600 dpi 
printer, none of the butt ugly 7x9 dot matrix fonts. Beautiful output, 10x 
faster than ever before.  Music to these old eyes.

There's some earlier versions of what I am running on my web page, but I 
need to replace them with a tarball containing the latest versions.  In 
the meantime, you bash hackers can fix whats there to do it your way if 
you'd like.

> Nick


Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
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Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS