On 29-Feb-16 13:05, Paul Koning wrote: >> On Feb 29, 2016, at 12:59 PM, Timothe Litt <l...@ieee.org> wrote: >> >> ... >> I created a printer class driver layer for simh when I did PDF output for >> all the emulators, but that went into a black hole of "more is not enough" >> and did not find its way into simh/master. > I looked at PostScript output for a printer, which is fairly easy and makes > it possible to do non-ASCII characters if the particular machine needs those. > In the end, I did it as an external program (small Python script) instead, > but in SimH would certainly not be hard. PS has the advantage that it's easy > to generate and easy to see what's going on, and it can either be printed > directly, or converted easily to PDF. > > PDF is an ISO archival standard and these days, more accessible than PS. To do anything with postscript, you need to get add-on software - usually ghostscript. Pretty much every PC, Mac and Linux box has a PDF reader out of the box. Several web browsers have built-in PDF interpreters. PDF supports non-ASCII characters. And PDF supports embedding other media types. You can (and I did) support compression and embedded images.
Anyhow, that's what I picked. I did the work of generating PDF with green (or blue or ..) bar paper, tractor feed holes, background logos, form sizes, overstrike, queuing to a spool directory, appending, checkpointing, etc. I had an escape sequence interpreter so anything not in the PDF character set (a superset of ASCII) could be generated fairly easily from a SimH driver. I provided translations for 32 character sets, from ASCII to Greek to Technical. I integrated it into all the simulators - not just DEC. It didn't preclude .txt output. But it became controversial for reasons not fully understood - and I was unwilling to keep implementing non-core features for specific host platforms. I had a lot of other pressures on my time. I gave up. I still think it was a nice piece of work, but clearly the community didn't. Anyhow, the point is that it's feasible to build a class driver layer & FWIW, my strong opinion is that for LPD bridges and any output formats, that's the way to go. Of course, given my experience, you might want to collect other opinions.
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