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From: trier@cwlim.INS.CWRU.Edu (Stephen C. Trier)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: Graphics on a Daisy Wheel Printer?
Message-ID: <1990Oct27.201338.4544@usenet.ins.cwru.edu>
Date: 27 Oct 90 20:13:38 GMT
References: <1990Oct23.053846.30151@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu> <1644@mitisft.Convergent.COM>
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I wrote a screen-dump program that did this for a Swintec 8012 daisywheel
attached to my family's Color Computer.  (This was a while back...)

It worked well, and generated better-looking output than many cheap dot-
matrix printers.  There were several caveats.

  1. It utterly *killed* the period leaf on the print wheel after a
     couple of screen dumps.  This was no problem, since at the time
     the printer was breaking the 'g' leaf off of print wheels faster
     than I could ruin '.' leaves.

  2. It ate up ribbon like mad.

  3. The screen dumps were INCREDIBLY slow.  (Example: A dump of a
     star on-screen made of exactly five line segments, only black
     areas being the line segments: 20 minutes print time!)

The program itself was trivial.

I've never seen any commercial programs that could do this, and I
wouldn't recommend it.  I've always wondered, though, why someone
couldn't build a 64-character vertical bit map wheel to allow dot
matrix printing, 6 bits at a time.

-- 
Stephen Trier                              Case Western Reserve University
Work: trier@cwlim.ins.cwru.edu             Information Network Services
Home: sct@seldon.clv.oh.us