Wow !
There is some interest in that subject !
Just to add to my original post ........
This is for Panther and Jaguar on machines with a Serial Port !
Pre Jaguar may be able to use a different patch but i did not follow
through on that information .
The Printers covered are the stylewriter series ... I have included the
Readme Below .
People with only USB ports need to go down the Gimp Print track .... BUT
if your printer only has a serial port I have no idea what method of
connection you can use.
Printers that have a Parallel connection can use a USB to Parallel
converter cord
and there is a long list of printers covered by the Gimp driver suite.
Now as always there may be a trade off. If your printer worked great
as a serial machine the print speed will not necessarily be the same
using these methods. As it happens my old Stylewriter 2 prints about
as fast as it ever did .
Cheers
Bob
Foomatic for StyleWriter
This installer package will install the “lpstyl” Unix StyleWriter
driver by Monroe Williams(http://homepage.mac.com/monroe/styl/)and some
software from the Foomatic project(http://www.linuxprinting.org)that
allows you to use your StyleWriter in Mac OS X 10.2. It doesn’t install
Ghostscript, which is required as well.
According to the lpstyl and Foomatic documentation, it should work for
StyleWriter I, StyleWriter II, StyleWriter 1200, Color StyleWriter
1500, Color StyleWriter 2200, Color StyleWriter 2400, Color StyleWriter
2500. I have only tested it with a StyleWriter II however.
Installation
• If you don’t already have the Unix command line version of
Ghostscript (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you probably
don’t), install it. You can get the ESP Ghostscript package from
http://www.n.ethz.ch/student/walthec/stylewriter/ (or probably a newer
version from
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=18073), but any
other Ghostscript package, like the ones installed by
Fink(http://fink.sourceforge.net/)or Gerben Wierda’s
i-Installer(http://www.rna.nl/ii.html), should work as well.
• Install this package.
Use the included “Add StyleWriter to Printer List” and “Choose
Serial Port for StyleWriter” AppleScripts to do just what their names
say.
Afterwards, you should be able to use your StyleWriter in Mac OS X
applications like you would any other printer. If anything doesn’t
work, please contact me – but don’t expect too much from me, I’m not
the author of lpstyl and Foomatic and I don't know the inner workings
of either of them very well. All I did was package that stuff together,
write the configuration AppleScripts and test it all with my Wallstreet
PowerBook (Mac OS X 10.2.4) and StyleWriter II. If you consider
yourself Unix-savvy enough, you can also try reading “What happens
below the surface” below and the Foomatic CUPS
documentation(http://www.linuxprinting.org/cups-doc.html).
Christian Walther
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
February 2003
What happens below the surface
• This installer package installs
• lpstyl as /usr/local/bin/lpstyl-real
• the Foomatic filter perl script
/usr/libexec/cups/filter/cupsomatic
• PPDs for various StyleWriters in /usr/share/cups/model/
and restarts the CUPS daemon to make the new PPDs available.
• The “Add StyleWriter to Printer List” AppleScript uses the
“lpadmin” command line tool (which belongs to Mac OS X’ “BSD Subsystem”
package) to add the StyleWriter to CUPS’ printer list. I haven’t found
any way to do this in Print Center, the closest thing I achieved (using
the “Advanced” item that appears when you hold down the option key
while clicking “Add”) was a printer entry that worked, but wouldn’t
revert to the idle state after a job has been printed, blocking all
further print jobs.
• The “Choose Serial Port for StyleWriter” AppleScript writes a
short shell script to /usr/local/bin/lpstyl that invokes lpstyl-real
and passes its output to the right serial port. The original approach
of using a symbolic link /dev/stylewriter to the serial port device
doesn’t work because the /dev/ directory is cleaned up after every
restart.
Credits/Legal Stuff
lpstyl 0.9.9 © 1996-2000 by Monroe Williams.
Foomatic code and companion database by Grant Taylor, Till Kamppeter
and contributors, licensed under the GNU General Public License (see
the file “COPYING” in the Documentation folder).
Packaging and configuration AppleScripts by Christian Walther, public
domain - do with it what you like as long as you don’t claim it’s your
work.
