Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!math.fu-berlin.de!tmpmbx!actisb!federico
From: federico@actisb.UUCP (Federico Heinz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: The Printer Question
Keywords: non-laser low-cost printer support
Message-ID: <1431@actisb.UUCP>
Date: 4 Jun 91 13:28:50 GMT
Organization: Actis in Berlin GmbH, W. Germany
Lines: 32

So, The Printer Question has been asked for the umpteenth time. Enough
people have shown interest on support of printers other than the NeXT
and PostScript printers. Maybe we should get going, shouldn't we?
There's already a serial printer driver for the ImageWriter, and
there's the FAX support drivers. I don't know about the ImageWriter
driver, but I suppose it's slow. For FAXing, speed is limited anyway,
so it doesn't matter.

The main problem seems to be interfacing the printer to the NeXT,
because we don't have any paralell ports in our machines, and almost
all printers use those. Now, I understand that an
asynchronous-to-paralell converter is quite a trivial hardware
excercise, so that's out of the way. The problem of slow transmission
of bitmaps remains, however. I don't know what's the upper bound for
serial speed on the NeXT, but whatever it is, it's certainly too slow
for the job (we're speaking 360 DPI bitmaps here).

A real neat solution would involve a NeXT-printerPort-to-paralell
converter to send the data to the printer. Does anybody have
information about the electrical specifications of this port? I'm
asking about something more than just the connector pinout, but timing
data, data format, etc. Has anybody tried to do this? I'd volunteer to
do the software part of the Epson (yeech!) support if I could get
ahold of the ImageWriter sources to modify them. I also know some
people who could help me with the design of the converter.

I have a 24-pin NEC printer that's doing nothing but collect dirt
right now. It's loud, ugly, and produces awful results when compared
to a laser printer, but I think it's more than enough for drafts. If
this ever gets done, I promise I'll even paint it black.
-- 
               Federico Heinz (federico@actis.de)