| From: | Alastair M. Robinson |
| Date: | 1 Aug 2000 at 18:28:19 |
| Subject: | Re: Canon Can't |
Hi,
> The printer will take a scan cartridge, which sadly T-Print
> say they have no plans in supporting, Aw go on guys, make
> an excellent piece of software brilliant.
I think the problem here is the old EPP/ECP hardware incompatiblity thing
which caused so much grief with scanners/zip drives. It'd either need a
dongle borrowing spare lines from another port, or it'd only work with
IOBlix, etc.
> SURELY text through-put is the most basic function of any printer?.
Hadn't you noticed that since computers went mass-market everything's become
superficial ;o) (Case in point: scanner software - I want a program that lets me
change individual pixels, not turn pictures into calendars! I don't want to
click on the best of nine thumbnails, I want to enter the gamma coefficient
into a string gadget - or at least have the ability to do so!)
Raw text output is ugly. Printer manufacturers don't want people seeing
ugly printouts - so out goes the raw-text capability!
Besides, most people don't even realise that you can get quicker printouts
of raw text with older printers. In fact it's hard work explaining the
concept of raw text to many people!
> So now if I want to print anything from Yam, Devpac, or anything
> else that sends a text output I've got to save it to a file, load
> it into a "convenient" word processor to convert it to a bitmap
> before I get a result.
Well, bowing to the pressures of demand for superficially attractive
printouts, I knocked together some ARexx scripts to go with YAM. These
generate a PostScript file, which is passed to GhostScript for printing.
The results are *much* prettier - but take *much* longer to print.
If you want them, they're on Aminet as comm/mail/PSMail.lha
All the best,
What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft?
A-flat miner.
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