(Ted Harding) wrote:
I'm looking for a Linux program which will render on screen what should be printed by an Epson printer stream in Epson's "ESC/P2" code.
It's unlikely such a program exists. You could probably write one in (say) Perl using the instructions at http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/developer-html/gimpprint_35.html that would print ascii from the file to stdout. However, it looks like you want to emulate GDI mode printing, which is much harder: essentially, you want to create a "reverse printer driver". To make things harder, GDI mode printing is different for different Epson printers and there is no completely standard way of doing it. It might be enough to write something to print out the instructions in human readable form so that you could see whether your printer should be capable of rendering the output. I've used a hex editor for this purpose before. JDL