[Groff] ESC/P2 printer driver

[Roger Leigh]

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Hello,

I'm new to the list, and I'd just like to introduce myself.  I'm a
developer of Gimp-Print, a project developing photo-quality inkjet
printer drivers, and I have some experience of the ESC/P and ESC/P2
printer control languages.

For several reasons, I have need to print reports on various printers
(dot-matrix, inkjet and laser) as well as text terminals and graphics
displays.  PostScript isn't really a good option, since the drivers
for 9-pin dot matrix printers are terrible compared with the native
NLQ output.  Groff seems to be a good solution to this problem; the
only missing link is a output driver for ESC/P and ESC/P2 devices.

The ESC/P driver would be quite a simple driver.  All I want in this
case is an 80 col x 60 line extended ASCII output with bold, italics
etc.  This could probably be based on grotty.

The ESC/P2 driver could be quite a bit more clever.  ESC/P2 supports
~arbitrary placement of text in different typefaces, pitches and
sizes, and graphics support is much better, so conceptually there
could be two "layers" a graphics pixmap layer and a text layer which
can be overlaid during printing.  I'd fix the graphics resolution at
180 or 360 DPI.

Obviously, neither of these will be as nice as PostScript, but the
grops driver can be used when needed.  What I want from these is speed
and NLQ print quality on impact printers.


I've had a look in detail at the grotty driver, and I'm now starting
to look at the grolj4 driver.  AFAICT I need to write a DESC file,
font metrics for each supported font (I'm trying to get these from
Epson for their proportional typefaces) and possibly a roff file in
addition.

Is there any documentation of libdriver or the overall architecture of
groff?  Where should I start?


BTW, if and when this is ready for inclusion, I guess you'll want me
to fill out a FSF copyright assignment thing.  I'll be happy to do so.

Kind regards,
Roger

- -- 
Roger Leigh

                Printing on GNU/Linux?  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/
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