Re:Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
by mmmlinux on Friday October 04, 2024 @01:07PM
(#41743385)
Its not like a laser printer can really print line by line though.
Re:Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
by ssl-3 on Friday October 04, 2024 @01:43PM
(#41743725)
An old HP laser printer will buffer plain text line-by-line, and will print a page once the last line is buffered.
That buffer could have several random programs' outputs in it, all just dumped as simply as possible to /dev/lp0 (or lpt1 or whatever), and it works.
A LaserWriter can't do these things.
Re:Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
by tonyedgecombe on Friday October 04, 2024 @02:58PM
(#41744497)
>will print a page once the last line is buffered.
You could usually set a timeout to eject the page if no data had been received for a while.
>A LaserWriter can't do these things.
The LaserWriter could emulate a Diablo printer which would do the same thing. It wouldn't accept PostScript then though.
It would be possible to write a PostScript program that emulates ESC/P (or PCL), although then you would have to send an entire page (or a page break) before the page would be printed, unlike the old dot-matrix line printers that you can print one line at a time, PostScript can only print one page at a time.