Happy New Year, Folks! 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. Reason: I have a file of such data ("printed to file"). When output to a printer (Epson SQ-1170), it does not print correctly. I want to check whether it is the printer which may be at fault, or whether the data is incorrect (as output by a printer driver for this printer under Win98). Since it seems to consist almost entirely of binary (graphics) data, it is very hard to check it by hand, though various experimental cross-checks strongly suggest that the error is in the data stream. An independent program which should render the data stream correctly would probably clinch the matter. Any suggestions? Best wishes to all for 2003! Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 02-Jan-03 Time: 14:18:38 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
(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
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Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk