28 May
2021
28 May
'21
5:11 p.m.
Hi all,
what are the word processing options for a daisy wheel printer?
I would like to be able to write "bold face" (double stroke) and
underline some parts. I guess there aren't any other capabilities to
exploit on a daisy wheel printer.
Operating system is unixish (Linux/NetBSD/FreeBSD). MS-DOS would work, too.
Maybe something like (g|t)roff?
Is there something you'd recommend?
regards,
chris
28 May
28 May
5:40 p.m.
Some characters that might not otherwise be available could be done with
over-strike, such as an accent mark (When you apply for a job, do you send
a RESUME?") or the tilde over N (There is an exit off of 280 that is
incorrectly labelled "LA CANADA road") The en~e character is recognized
as a normal letter in Spanish.
Although there isn't a LOT of use for it, overstrike with hyphens is
sometimes used to indicate an informal edit or redaction.
Some daisy wheel printers, even some models of HiType I, such as DTC-300,
had micro-spacing.
Besides PROPORTIONAL spacing,
You could print a period, move a TINY amount, print another period, and be
able to draw or plot. (Or would that be PLOD? And you thought that a
Calcomp Plodder was slow!))
Some daisy wheels had reinfoced period, underline and hyphen to prevent
premature wear.
Wordstar had some "drivers" for proportional spacing.
I kinda doubt that there are practical Windoze drivers.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
On Sat, 29 May 2021, Christian Groessler via cctalk wrote:
Hi all,
what are the word processing options for a daisy wheel printer?
I would like to be able to write "bold face" (double stroke) and underline
some parts. I guess there aren't any other capabilities to exploit on a daisy
wheel printer.
Operating system is unixish (Linux/NetBSD/FreeBSD). MS-DOS would work, too.
Maybe something like (g|t)roff?
Is there something you'd recommend?
regards,
chris
7:19 p.m.
On 5/28/21 5:40 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
Some characters that might not otherwise be available
could be done with
over-strike, such as an accent mark (When you apply for a job, do you
send a RESUME?") or the tilde over N (There is an exit off of 280 that
is incorrectly labelled "LA CANADA road")? The en~e character is
recognized as a normal letter in Spanish.
Although there isn't a LOT of use for it, overstrike with hyphens is
sometimes used to indicate an informal edit or redaction.
Some daisy wheel printers, even some models of HiType I, such as
DTC-300, had micro-spacing.
Besides PROPORTIONAL spacing, You could print a period, move a TINY
amount, print another period, and be able to draw or plot. (Or would
that be PLOD?? And you thought that a Calcomp Plodder was slow!))
Some daisy wheels had reinfoced period, underline and hyphen to prevent
premature wear.
I used a Hitype I with 12 bit OEM interface and a 2P+S S100 card back in
the day. Since every bit of movement was under control of the program
driving the interface, you could do not only PS with bidirectional
"smart" positioning, but also plotting. I probably have my drivers for
8080 on an 8" disk somewhere. ISTR after nearly 50 years, that the
movement granularity was about 1/48 of an inch. The power supply for
that thing was separate and had 3 noisy fans.
After the success of the Diablo Hitype models, other outfits had similar
products. I think I have one of NEC Spinwriters tucked away somewhere,
which used not a typewheel, but cup-shaped "thimble". Early one, Qume
was a major competitor of Diablo--no surprise, since a fair number of
the original staff fled Diablo after the Xerox purchase.
Of course, daisywheel technology took over the typewriter market after
the original patents had lapsed. IBM used them extensively on their
typewriters, as did Brother. "Fully formed characters" as opposed to
dot-matrix was a big thing back then.
--Chuck
11:29 p.m.
On 29/05/21 2:40 am, Fred Cisin via cctech wrote:
Wordstar had some "drivers" for proportional
spacing.
I kinda doubt that there are practical Windoze drivers.
Yes. I seem to recall that Wordstar had fairly sophisticated support for
printers, though you would probably still have to configure the basic
Escape sequences unless you're lucky enough to find the set for your
printer.
https://www.wordstar.org/index.php/wsdos-support/wsdos-printing/126-wordsta…
Note - double-strike bold doesn't work so well with a film ribbon.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred???????????? cisin at xenosoft.com
--
Lawrence Wilkinson lawrence at ljw.me.uk
The IBM 360/30 page http://www.ljw.me.uk/ibm360
29 May
29 May
12:26 a.m.
On 5/28/21 11:29 PM, Lawrence Wilkinson via cctalk wrote:
On 29/05/21 2:40 am, Fred Cisin via cctech wrote:
CP/M Wordstar 3.3 could do proportional spacing, but it was broken as
released. For a few bucks, a third party would send patches and
directions for use. Believe it or not, I still have that stuff.
Wordstar 4.0 for CP/M-80 was much improved; I suspect it was altogether
new code (possibly from New word?). I have that one also, still in the box.
When MSDOS rolled around, the game for WS changed dramatically. I think
that it went as far as WS 7 (I think I have an unopened box of that
too). The problem was that the competition (Word Perfect, then MS Word)
was just so much more capable.
I used Wordstar for a long time, starting with version 0.90. I briefly
moved sideways to Wordstar 2000. Not a bad product, but totally unlike
standard WS, and too late to the party--I used it for documentation for
a few years.
I pretty much left the world of daisywheel printers when the first HP
Laserjet broke onto the scene. Beautiful output--and so much faster
and quieter!
--Chuck
Wordstar had some "drivers" for
proportional spacing.
I kinda doubt that there are practical Windoze drivers.
Yes. I seem to recall that Wordstar had fairly sophisticated support for
printers, though you would probably still have to configure the basic
Escape sequences unless you're lucky enough to find the set for your
printer. 
12:38 a.m.
On Sat, May 29, 2021 at 8:26 AM Chuck Guzis via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
I pretty much left the world of daisywheel printers
when the first HP
Laserjet broke onto the scene. Beautiful output--and so much faster
and quieter!
)
Agreed, although I'd love an HP9871 for my HP9830, just to see that
mechanism work (it has a pair of DC motors on the main chassis, if
they rotate in the same direction it spins the daisywheel, if they
rotate in opposite directions it moves the carriage. Or maybe the
other way round). I do have the right interface for the HP9830.
Getting back to an earlier message, the 'Apple Plot' program for the
Apple ][ included a high-res graphics screen dump program to the Qume
Sprint 5. It only used the full stop (period) character, moved the
carriage and paper using the proportional spacing commands, and made
a heck of racket.
I have a printer which consists of a Diablo 630 chassis with a dot
matrix head. A Sanders 700. It takes little ROM cartridges for the
fonts (alas no downloadable fonts sor graphics mode) and does up to 8
passes to produce almost daisywheel quality output. I also have the
older Sanders 12/7 which takes sets of EPROMs for the fonts and is I
think better made, but is otherwise similar to the user. Internally
they are very different, the 12/7 has a single Z80 processor, DMA
channels for data input and printhead output and a state machine to
actually control the printhead. The 700 has the Z80 processor too, but
with a Z8 for data input and another Z8 to fire the printhead.
-tony
--Chuck
9:21 a.m.
On 5/29/21 12:38 AM, Tony Duell wrote:
I have a printer which consists of a Diablo 630
chassis with a dot
matrix head. A Sanders 700. It takes little ROM cartridges for the
fonts (alas no downloadable fonts sor graphics mode) and does up to 8
passes to produce almost daisywheel quality output. I also have the
older Sanders 12/7 which takes sets of EPROMs for the fonts and is I
think better made, but is otherwise similar to the user. Internally
they are very different, the 12/7 has a single Z80 processor, DMA
channels for data input and printhead output and a state machine to
actually control the printhead. The 700 has the Z80 processor too, but
with a Z8 for data input and another Z8 to fire the printhead.
I had several Diablo emigrees as co-workers in one job I held. One of
the things they brought along was a Diablo dot-matrix printer. It used
three (!) Rockwell PPS8 MPUs, had a carriage motor that could take your
arm off, tractor feed only and was screamingly loud. Interface was
Centronics parallel. I've never seen another one, so I can't even
comment on the model number, if there was one. This was about 1976 or so.
It was used as a backup printer when the Teletype Dataspeed 40 line
printer was otherwise occupied.
Then there were the multipass NLQ dot matrix setups with downloadable
fonts. I still have a couple of those.
--Chuck
8:23 a.m.
On 5/29/21 2:11 AM, Christian Groessler via cctalk wrote:
Operating system is unixish (Linux/NetBSD/FreeBSD). MS-DOS would work,
too.
Maybe something like (g|t)roff?
Ok, so Wordstar should work. I think I have version 5 or 6 for DOS.
Were there Unix versions of WS? Or any other solution with Unix? I
prefer the ability to log in from remote.
regards,
chris
8:47 a.m.
On Sat, 29 May 2021, Christian Groessler via cctalk wrote:
Were there Unix versions of WS? Or any other solution
with Unix? I prefer
the ability to log in from remote.
I think Gnu troff and/or ghostscript should have a suitable driver. Old
drivers are rarely deleted even years after they fall out of popularity.
I still have a Xerox 1750 daisy wheel printer in the attic that I brought
home from work when the newly arrived Imagen laser printer and ditroff made
the 1750 unfashionable.
At work we used TROFF to drive the 1750 for letter quality output, the
bulk of the printing was done with two Data Printer Corporations Chaintrain
printers (for some reason I have the DPC maintenance manuals here at home)
which were certainly not letter quality.
After I brought the 1750 home I ran it with troff on my BSDi Unix box for a
number of years and drove it with Wordstar 4.0 on my TRS-80 Model II CP/M.
It was a good letter quality printer but I never tried any clever graphics
or anything like that even though it was documented in the 1750 manual.
The 1750 was retired after I broke a petal off my last surviving Courier 10
print wheel and could not find any replacements. I replaced the 1750
with a Deskjet 500 that I also fished out of the trash at work and ran for
ten years without any major repairs but I had retired the TRS80 by the
time I got the DeskJet 500 so I never tried to make it work with WordStar.
--
Richard Loken VE6BSV : "...underneath those tuques we wear,
Athabasca, Alberta Canada : our heads are naked!"
** rlloken at telus.net ** : - Arthur Black
6:12 p.m.
Hi Chris
I had a Brother daisy wheel that would do a single step of the stepper and a second
strike, for bold. You need to have the right esc sequence. Just about every printer is
different until HP had a standard( pscl5 as I recall ).
Dwight
________________________________
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Richard Loken via
cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 29, 2021 8:47 AM
To: Christian Groessler <chris at groessler.org>; General Discussion: On-Topic and
Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: how to make use of daisy wheel printer
On Sat, 29 May 2021, Christian Groessler via cctalk wrote:
Were there Unix versions of WS? Or any other solution
with Unix? I prefer
the ability to log in from remote.
I think Gnu troff and/or ghostscript should have a suitable driver. Old
drivers are rarely deleted even years after they fall out of popularity.
I still have a Xerox 1750 daisy wheel printer in the attic that I brought
home from work when the newly arrived Imagen laser printer and ditroff made
the 1750 unfashionable.
At work we used TROFF to drive the 1750 for letter quality output, the
bulk of the printing was done with two Data Printer Corporations Chaintrain
printers (for some reason I have the DPC maintenance manuals here at home)
which were certainly not letter quality.
After I brought the 1750 home I ran it with troff on my BSDi Unix box for a
number of years and drove it with Wordstar 4.0 on my TRS-80 Model II CP/M.
It was a good letter quality printer but I never tried any clever graphics
or anything like that even though it was documented in the 1750 manual.
The 1750 was retired after I broke a petal off my last surviving Courier 10
print wheel and could not find any replacements. I replaced the 1750
with a Deskjet 500 that I also fished out of the trash at work and ran for
ten years without any major repairs but I had retired the TRS80 by the
time I got the DeskJet 500 so I never tried to make it work with WordStar.
--
Richard Loken VE6BSV : "...underneath those tuques we wear,
Athabasca, Alberta Canada : our heads are naked!"
** rlloken at telus.net ** : - Arthur Black
6:42 p.m.
On Sun, 30 May 2021, dwight via cctalk wrote:
I had a Brother daisy wheel that would do a single
step of the stepper
and a second strike, for bold. You need to have the right esc sequence.
Just about every printer is different until HP had a standard( pscl5 as
I recall ).
Prior to the HP PCL (Printer Command Language), quite a few printers put
in Epson [MX80] emulation.
HP introduced PCL in 1984.
When they introduced the LaserJet["Minus"] (still in 1984) they were up to
PCL 3.
LaserJet PLUS got PCL 4. That remained active for a very long time.
"Intellifont" font scaling was in PCL 5 (for LaserJet III?)
PCL 6 (1995?) was optimized for Windows.
In terms of "backwards compatability", EVERY subsequent operating system
SHOULD be capable of working with all prior drivers, albeit without
whatever new features that have been added.
And, EVERY new[er] model or printer SHOULD be capable of working with the
older printer drivers, albeit without whatever new features that have been
added.
When you upgrade your hardware, OR upgrade your software, you SHOULD be
able to immediately function with your existing drivers, unless/until you
get newer drivers that include the added features.
I remember the "techs" at the college computer lab bought a new
"all in one" HP "OfficeJet"? printer and a new version of Windows
(XP?),
and were "UNABLE to obtain drivers"!
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
9:02 p.m.
On 5/29/21 6:42 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
On Sun, 30 May 2021, dwight via cctalk wrote:
My Panasonic laser printer purchased sometime before 1990, did PCL,
Epson MX and Diablo 630 emulation.
--Chuck
I had a Brother daisy wheel that would do a
single step of the stepper
and a second strike, for bold. You need to have the right esc
sequence. Just about every printer is different until HP had a
standard( pscl5 as I recall ).
Prior to the HP PCL (Printer Command Language), quite a few printers put
in Epson [MX80] emulation.
HP introduced PCL in 1984.
When they introduced the LaserJet["Minus"] (still in 1984) they were up
to PCL 3.
LaserJet PLUS got PCL 4.? That remained active for a very long time.
"Intellifont" font scaling was in PCL 5 (for LaserJet III?)
PCL 6 (1995?) was optimized for Windows.
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11 comments
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-
ard.p850ug1＠gmail.com -
cclist＠sydex.com -
chris＠groessler.org -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
dkelvey＠hotmail.com -
ljw-cctech＠ljw.me.uk -
rlloken＠telus.net