Thanks, Frank:
Epson dot matrix printers (ESC*P language) were perfectly willing to print individual characters, a line at a time I guess. They were (are) line printers and the ESC*P "language" is little more than an "extension" of raw ASCII + control characters (CR, LF, FF etc) by "escape sequences on top" - for switching fonts and maybe more complex tasks.
Back in the day, I wrote in PROLOG, a custom word-processor outputting from my DOS palmtop to a dot-matrix printer.
Laser printer formats are page-oriented, and are not "evolved from plain ASCII" in the way that sending a paragraph of raw ASCII text would yield visible output on paper, even if a "formfeed" provokes the printer to load paper and print a page (not sure if this even works). Even in PCL, you need to provide some commands to the printer, to place some text on the page and get it "rendered on paper". Let alone PostScript - quite a tightly specified "well formed" format. Obviously you can embed bitmaps in PCL and PostScript print jobs. Esc*P can do it too. When printing from modern software, every page can be just a huge embedded bitmap. And, there are printers that can *only* print bitmaps, albeit in a thin wrap of some standardized format: think PCLm (in spite of its name, it is a gutted / stripped down version of PDF).
Is there some DOS software package that can take an input text file and output formatted for a modern laser printer?
-- members.iinet.net.au/~kilgallin/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
