[Groff] Re: Printing to Epson dot matrix

[Manas Laha]

The Epson EX-1000 should be capable of printing bit-mapped graphics, in
which  case the best bet would be:

i) Produce Postscript output
ii) Convert the same to Epson-compatible graphics format using
ghostscript with the option DEVICE=epson and just dump the resulting
file to the printer. The ghostscript man page gives more information
including how to set printer resolution and break up the output into one
file per page (which feature is likely to be useful).

While this method allows you to print everything on your dot-matrix
printer that you could print on a laser, its likely to be rather slow.
If you are printing in fixed-width font, you might like to run groff
with -Tascii and, again, dump the resulting file to the printer. Groff
should take care of bold and italics, without your having to take extra
pains. This method is much faster but limited to fixed-width text only.

As for using the proportional fonts on the printer, you may do that
using the second method. But you will very likely lose the justification
of the right margin (and any column alignments that tbl might produce).

- Manas Laha
 
> Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 17:37:10 +0200
> From: address@hidden
> To: undisclosed-recipients:;
> Subject: [Groff] Printing to Epson dot matrix
> 
> Greetings and sorry if this is a FAQ.
> 
> I have just started learning troff/groff because I noticed that it was
> originally developed to print on something called a CAT phototypesetter
> that had just a few fonts.  I thought it would be a good fit for my
> relatively simple needs.  I have an Epson EX-1000 dot matrix printer.
> This printer has draft, roman, and sans serif fonts.  It does
> superscript/subscript, condensed, pica, and elite printing; monospaced
> or proportional.
> 
> It isn't clear to me how to get troff or groff to output the proper
> codes to make the Epson change fonts, or do bold, underlined, or
> italics.  Can someone please give me any pointers?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> -m
> 
> --__--__--