🚀 go-pugleaf

Questions, questions, and more questions...

I have written a printer driver for a Toshiba P1340 printer.
It doesn't support all printer functions yet; mostly because I don't
know what some of the sequences are supposed to do.
For instance, what is the difference between "RESET" and "INITIALIZE" ?
("aRIN" and "aRIS" I believe are the correct names for these). -- My
driver treats these as the same for now.  What is the "set normalization on"
sequence for? (I first thought that this pertained to justification,
but there are separate codes for that.)  Etc. etc.  Unfortunately I don't
have the manuals with me here else I would list all the sequences I don't
understand.

My biggest question pertains to graphics dumps.  When I print pictures,
the shading comes out very poorly.  White prints as white, but other
colors generally print in various _very_ dark shades of gray, even if the
color is very bright on the screen (such as yellow).  The dithering
algorithm seems not to work very well; printed images have next to no contrast,
if you ignore white.  I've seen this also with images dumped on some 
other printers, and know that there are others out there who also would
like to have an answer about this.  So how about it?  Do the dithering
routines in the Amiga just work terribly poorly, or am I doing something
wrong?   ... before someone suggests it, YES I DO HAVE "grey-scale" set
in preferences.

Another problem:
My DoSpecial seems to get called for a lot of functions where it shouldn't
be.  There are entries in the command-table which do NOT contain any \377
characters, but for which DoSpecial is still being called.  I thought 
DoSpecial was only supposed to be called for functions which couldn't be
handled through simple text substitution via the command-table.  Yet
some entries in the command table work fine.

My last question is not about the driver per se, but is simply a request for
opinions on how to handle certain sequences:

The P1340 unfortunately is not very smart in regards to different character
sets et al.  It's a 24 pin printer which prints very nicely, particularly
when put into NLQ mode.  However, it does not have italics or boldface, 
although it does have underlining.  The question is: how should I treat
requests for italics and other special fonts?  My current solution is to
treat any request for italics/boldface/shadow-print/etc as a single 
"standout" mode.  If I am in draft-mode (non NLQ), I turn on NLQ mode,
which causes the text in "standout" mode to print as darker and more
distinct than the surrounding text.  When all "standout" attributes are turned
off, I switch back to draft mode.  If I'm already in NLQ mode,
there's nothing much I can do, so I just ignore the requests.  I can't say
that I really like this arrangement, but I don't have any better ideas.
Suggestions?

Well, enough noise for now... thanks in advance for any help you'd care to
send.

       --- Mark ---