....snip...

Writing your own printer driver in Perl is NOT the way to go! You should
investigate what printer interfaces Linux has and be using those. Drivers,
whether for printers, screens or most other devices are where you start to
have to be platform specific.

That said, some languages (such as Java) have abstraction libraries that you
can write to. Someone else writes the translation from abstraction to
Linux/Windows/ whilst you write to the abstraction layer
interface (which is all portable code).

So, see what abstraction layers you can find that will allow you to do this.
Don't get delving into PCL3 because then you'll end up tying yourself to HP
printers, and maybe even the specific model, if you're not careful - and
that's hardly open ;-).

Paul DS.

Yes! Linux has perfectly fine drivers and support for HP DeskJets, PostScript
printers, and some other printers. I've never done any Linux programming, but
there has to be a standard high-level printer API, just as there is for
Windows... Ben Myers

On Wed, 7 Mar 2007 09:06:11 -0000, "Paul D.Smith"
wrote:

>...snip...
>
>Writing your own printer driver in Perl is NOT the way to go! You should
>investigate what printer interfaces Linux has and be using those. Drivers,
>whether for printers, screens or most other devices are where you start to
>have to be platform specific.
>
>That said, some languages (such as Java) have abstraction libraries that you
>can write to. Someone else writes the translation from abstraction to
>Linux/Windows/ whilst you write to the abstraction layer
>interface (which is all portable code).
>
>So, see what abstraction layers you can find that will allow you to do this.
>Don't get delving into PCL3 because then you'll end up tying yourself to HP
>printers, and maybe even the specific model, if you're not careful - and
>that's hardly open ;-).
>
>Paul DS.
>

On Mon, 05 Mar 2007 09:59:56 +0100, Huub <"v.niekerk at hccnet.nl">
wrote:

>Hi,
>
>For quite some time I've been trying to print on a DeskJet 940C from a
>MySQL database using Linux/Perl. Until now, using WP Office and a
>DeskJet 520, all text is printed nicely with e.g. arial 10dpi but I want
>to get all things opensource. So far, when printing from Perl and using
>some found PCL codes that should be correct, the text is printed too
>large and in the wrong fonttype. Can someone please provide me with a
>link to a PCL3 manual in which all codes are given so I can get it fixed?
>
>Thanks for your help.
>
>Huub

I notice in a Google lookup that there's a PCL3 output module for the
open source program Ghostscript. (Ghostscript interprets Postscript
and Adobe PDF files.)

This is distributed as source code. So perhaps having the source code
for a printer driver would be useful in learning PCL3.

http://home.vrweb.de/martin.lottermoser/pcl3.html

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

Ben Myers wrote:
> Yes! Linux has perfectly fine drivers and support for HP DeskJets, PostScript
> printers, and some other printers. I've never done any Linux programming, but
> there has to be a standard high-level printer API, just as there is for
> Windows... Ben Myers
>

So what would you suggest in this case of printing from Perl? Printing
to file and then printing the file using e.g. gs -sDeskJet520=pcl3
?

That would certainly be much cleaner than having Perl emit PCL codes
interspersed with what ever else is being printed. And it would be easy to
change the printer, in the event that the Deskjet520 failed and was replaced by
another printer... Ben Myers

On Sat, 10 Mar 2007 22:15:03 +0100, Huub <"v.niekerk at hccnet.nl"> wrote:

>Ben Myers wrote:
>> Yes! Linux has perfectly fine drivers and support for HP DeskJets, PostScript
>> printers, and some other printers. I've never done any Linux programming, but
>> there has to be a standard high-level printer API, just as there is for
>> Windows... Ben Myers
>>
>
>So what would you suggest in this case of printing from Perl? Printing
>to file and then printing the file using e.g. gs -sDeskJet520=pcl3
>?

Huub <"v.niekerk at hccnet.nl"> wrote:

> Ben Myers wrote:
>> Yes! Linux has perfectly fine drivers and support for HP DeskJets,
>> PostScript
>> printers, and some other printers. I've never done any Linux
>> programming, but there has to be a standard high-level printer API, just
>> as there is for Windows... Ben Myers
>>
>
> So what would you suggest in this case of printing from Perl? Printing
> to file and then printing the file using e.g. gs -sDeskJet520=pcl3
> ?

Using lp rather than gs may make more sense.

Huub <"v.niekerk at hccnet.nl"> wrote:
> Ben Myers wrote:
>> Yes! Linux has perfectly fine drivers and support for HP DeskJets, PostScript
>> printers, and some other printers. I've never done any Linux programming, but
>> there has to be a standard high-level printer API, just as there is for
>> Windows... Ben Myers
>
> So what would you suggest in this case of printing from Perl? Printing
> to file and then printing the file using e.g. gs -sDeskJet520=pcl3
>?

The best way is to generate PostScript output. PostScript is device-
and resolution-independent, and can be easily converted to PDF or about
any type of bitmap output.

If you don't want to generate low-level PS by yourself, there are Perl
modules that may be useful, like PostScript::Simple.

--
Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota * USA