Wednesday, August 04, 2010

change formatting to print to a smaller paper size

A follow-up to my earlier post about printing with dot-matrix printers. I needed to print multiple pages to a different paper size. On Windows,
type filename.bin > lpt1
works best, since it can be added to batch jobs.
copy filename.bin > lpt1
works only for a single invocation at a time. Adding it multiple times to a batch job does the "copy" only once, so only one page is printed.

Till now we used condensed mode extensively. Now, found 15 cpi mode is almost as dense, but much prettier. For setting the paper size, the commands I used were, in Hex,
1B32 - sets 1/6 inch line spacing
1B43420D0D - sets the page length to 66 lines. Since it is 1/6 inch line spacing, that makes it 11 inches. The 0Ds are just padding, I think, but I added them just to be safe. Viewed a page printed to file using the printer driver in a hex editor to be sure of the way to add the 66 lines part. The command for font cpi comes last
1B67 - sets 15 cpi

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