The Sinclair QL Forum

Ralf R. wrote: Ain't there any books from Epson? When I bought my Epson EPL 5200 Laser, I also ordered the GQ Language Book from them for PROGS (but they did not succeed).

Or try to ask Jochen, he was very clever in using the GQ language (even from SuperBASIC), so maybe he was lucky in using the DPI modes you need.

There is the ESC/P2 programmmers reference guide (which I have) but it does not touch on the 1440 or 2880 dpi modes - I believe that these were fudges by Epson rather than extending the ESC/P2 language to support them. I am a member of Epson Developers, so will have to ask them again - I have already asked them for the fonts they use in their printers so I will see if I can get them!

For me this is a QL hardware discussion thread: it's about an interface to add a Pi to a QL, including elements of the software that would run on the Pi to make it work with QL hardware.

I am about to start my road trip home. I'll pop up and continue in three or four days.

Evening Rich,

This page, https://sarata.com/manpages/gs-stp.1.html, gives the impression that the upwards of 1440 dpi modes don't tend to give much if anything in the way of quality improvements. It looks like 1440 by 720 is maximum quality on photo paper.

Cheers,
Norm.

It is not so much a case now of wanting to support 1440dpi (or 2880dpi) for printed output - but the printer conversion software needs to be able to handle output which is sent to it using these modes (although it is unlikely that this will be used by anything using the conversion software).

BTW: Are there any driver (WIN 3.1, 95, NT) which support the higher DPI rates? As this ain't a "dumb" printer (as nowadays) such driver should be helpful.

Dave wrote:For me this is a QL hardware discussion thread: it's about an interface to add a Pi to a QL, including elements of the software that would run on the Pi to make it work with QL hardware.

No, that was in a different thread. Here, there Raspberry Pi gets a printer port, completely non-QL specific. And that was not even issue of discussion. It's all about a Raspberry Pi software project for Epson Printer code conversion. Interesting, but definitly software, not hardware. I'd propose moving it to the software section, which might increase helpful contributions.

BTW I started a little work to make the software work on QDOS/SMS side, but it seems far too slow.

Peter wrote: Here, there Raspberry Pi gets a printer port, completely non-QL specific. And that was not even issue of discussion. It's all about a Raspberry Pi software project for Epson Printer code conversion. Interesting, but definitly software, not hardware. I'd propose moving it to the software section, which might increase helpful contributions.

Ah - I see your point - I agree - I have asked the moderators to move this thread and will then rename the first post

Peter wrote: BTW I started a little work to make the software work on QDOS/SMS side, but it seems far too slow.

I am open to suggestions as to how to speed it up - it would probably need some parts re-writing in machine code to be honest (same as I had to do with the ESC/P2 printer drivers)

At one point I had a version that almost compiled with QDOS-GCC / C68. I tried to make changes in a way so common sources with the Raspberry Pi could be kept, but that makes the code less legible, unless some structural changes are made. At the moment I have no more time I can put into this. A common project for QDOS/SMS and Raspberry Pi might increase motivation to optmize speed. But not if even the Raspberry Pi is too slow, meaning a QDOS/SMS system will be 10...100 times slower.

The Rasberry Pi takes about 1 1/2 minutes to convert a page at the moment which seems slow when testing, but is faster than a dot matrix printer

Will it have a small speaker, and make a grrrp grrp thump thump grrrp noise?