Printer format conversion

[Bahjah]

I have a legacy application that was set up and designed to print direct
through serial ports to Okidata printers. I want to allow users to printer
to their HP LJ's. Is there a middleware app out there that will handle the
conversion for me? I can map the port to my print queue, but of course
Oki's don't talk PCL, or PS for that matter, so it comes out a mess.

Thanks

 

[Alan]

I have a legacy application that was set up and designed to print direct
through serial ports to Okidata printers. I want to allow users to printer
to their HP LJ's. Is there a middleware app out there that will handle the
conversion for me? I can map the port to my print queue, but of course
Oki's don't talk PCL, or PS for that matter, so it comes out a mess.

I assume that this prints to Epson-type dot matrix.

Here are a couple of apps that might work:
DOSprint <http://www.dosprint.com/>
Printfil <http://www.guolo.com/printfil/edown.htm>

Otherwise, if you want something free and more geeky, you might look
at
<http://ppr.trincoll.edu/ppr-doc-1.51/refman/ppr-filters.1.html> which
has filters to convert dotmatrix commands to Postscript. If you don't
have a PS printer you can run that through Ghostscript to print to
PCL.

Someone may already have written a converter direct to PCL; in
principle it wouldn't be hard. Actually some lasers can interpret
Epson dotmatrix, and there are also cartridges available that add that
to some models. e.g.
<http://www.printerworks.com/Catalogs/SX-Catalog/SX-TextOnly/TSX-HP_FontCartridges.html#Epson-IBM>

 

[Davide Guolo]

Bahjah,

I have a legacy application that was set up and designed to print direct
through serial ports to Okidata printers. I want to allow users to printer
to their HP LJ's. Is there a middleware app out there that will handle the
conversion for me? I can map the port to my print queue, but of course
Oki's don't talk PCL, or PS for that matter, so it comes out a mess.

As Alan said, Printfil can interpret your print jobs and substitute the
legacy Okidata ESC codes with the correct ones for the desired Windows
printer going through the Windows driver.

This is true if:
1) You can redirect your print jobs to a disk file
2) Your app runs on a Windows PC (or the file is visible by a shared disk:
Samba, SCO VisionFS etc.)
3) Your legacy app prints reports (characters) and do not prints graphics
(drawings)

You can try yourself if Printfil suites your needs by downloading the free
trial.

If you need help on configuring Printfil to recognize your Okidata ESC
codes, feel free to write me at my private e-mail address.

Kind regards
Davide Guolo