an application with print on dot matrix printer
james_027
what is the nice way to provide a print function on a dot matrix
printer for django apps aside from generating a printer friendly page?
Thanks
james
Tim Chase
> printer for django apps aside from generating a printer friendly page?
My understanding is that there isn't any "nice way...aside from
generating a printer friendly page".
The web browser can render to a printer context. This might be a
regular printer, a PDF, a text-file, or a generic text-only printer.
Dot-matrix printers do support graphics, but each has its own PCL
for creating them. I've written my share of dot-matrix printer
drivers back in the DOS days (and thermal "dot-matrix" printers
by the likes of companies like Zebra, Epson, and Brother). Each
has its own peculiarities and none of them were as easy/simple as
just drawing on a canvas.
The printer driver(s) will sit between your browser's print
functionality and the printer. If you have a true printer driver
designed to print graphics (like most win32 dot-matrix printer
drivers are set up to do), it's painfully slow, loud, and
low-resolution. You can set up a generic text printer driver in
Win32 (and usually a similar "lp" setting on *nix). With this
driver, only text gets sent to the printer (perhaps with a few
scant formatting options for bold or underline). This is much
faster for printing, but does text only (possibly including a few
"graphical" glyph characters).
Thus, you need to make a text-only "printer-friendly page" and
then print to a "generic text only printer" driver for
best/fastest results.
A freak alternative would be if the dot-matrix printer was hooked
up to your *server* (rather than your browsing machine).
Django/Python could send text to the printer device directly, but
this removes some of the benefits of the web such as non-locality.
My $0.02 (adjusted for inflation, minus taxes and
social-security, that ain't worth much)
-tim