🚀 go-pugleaf

Alexix Rosen writes:
>I would like a bare-bones serial driver which will just let me pass through
>any ascii character to the printer. Eventually I will need to read information
>back from the printer but I can worry about that later. The question is, does
>anyone sell such a driver? Is there one in the Publlic Domain, or is there a
>shareware one?

I have a program that dumps textfiles to the ImageWriter II as standard
ASCII characters (native mode).  The Turbo Pascal source code can be
found in Programming With Macintosh Turbo Pascal by Tom Swan (btw: that
is a great book!).  This driver might do what you need, or give an idea
of how to construct one.

>If not, I will write it myself. Writing a standard Printer Driverfor the Mac
>is suppoesed to be a horrendous task, but this shouldn't be so tough, as it
>need only accept draft-mode stuff. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how
>to begin? How about source code (I speak Pascal, C, Assembly, others).

Although I am not a Mac programmer nor have I tried this on a Mac,
every horrendous task normally has a quick & dirty alternative.
Turbo Pascal (and others, I might quess) allows one to open the
serial port as a text file and then write to it.

Something like this should work:

  var 
    prntr : text;
    ch    : char;

  begin
    rewrite( prntr, 'Printer:' );
    write( prntr, ch );
  end;

I actually did this on the IttyBittyMachine (IBM-PC) to make a printer
driver and font installer for my ImageWriter II.  


OS/2: Just Say No.        An Apple-A-Day Takes My Credit Card Away. 
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John Weeks                                    jweeks@luke.d.umn.edu
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