Modern thermal printer to emulate 82240B

[Thomas Okken]

(02-25-2018 12:42 PM)tcab Wrote:  

(02-25-2018 03:17 AM)Thomas Okken Wrote:  If you can send graphics to the printer, you might be better off translating the bitmap part of the shell_print() calls to graphics escape sequences and sending only those. That way you'd get the actual HP-42S character shapes, no worrying about code pages, and as a bonus, PRLCD would also work.

I presume this would mean a custom build of Free42, adding some code to its shell_print() function. This would indeed be a powerful approach, with the downside of having to recompile Free42. Perhaps Free42 could have an option to generate another kind of file, a 'raw virtual out' which has all the information needed to print both text and graphics, which would mean custom builds of Free42 would not be necessary.

In other words, you don't want to do it, and would prefer if I did it?
Sorry, but no.

(02-25-2018 12:42 PM)tcab Wrote:  My current lazy approach has been to watch the text file generated by the 'Print to textfile' feature of Free42 - detect and read any new text output and print it to the TM-T20 thermal printer, using ESCPOS commands. This works, except for the rendering of special characters. And yes, I don't get graphics.

That's not a bad approach, but as far as the special characters are concerned, bear in mind that the text file output from Free42 is UTF-8 encoded, not HP Roman.

You could even get graphics this way, using the "print to gif" feature.