World: r3wp

yeah :-(

cheap host based printer

now if they stopped that winprinter crap and had postscript as standard 
in all printers... the hardware to do that should be fairly cheap 
for that today.

so it will always be slower than a PS printe.

yes, I don't expect it to be as fast as PS, but this is like... 25-50 
times slower. :-)

do you need to print as soon as possible?

You do know that ghostscript can convert ps to pcl ??

and then you can dump the resulting prn file to the printer vs creating 
a bitmap??

Since the printer driver is host based, it would be doing the same 
thing as well.

I did not know that.

if it can that makes my task simpler.

the product description says that the HHP 1505 is a host based PCL 
printer

yes it is. I think all HP printers are.

no

well, as long as this one is.. :-)

try sending some raw PCL to the printer to see what happens

If it doesn't understand it .. then it's just a dumb printer

with a PCL driver

hmm... need some examples for that.

and a new PC. that stupid machine just died. glorious day today.

setup a HP printer ( eg an old laserjet ) and set the driver to print 
to a file

take the printer output and send it directly to the printer if you 
can .. see what happens

My guess is that it doesn't have any PCL engine on boad.

it might not

the HP driver probably takes PCL and creates a bitmap and then sends 
it to the printer

as opposed to sending PCL to the printer... well, that is my guess

if anything, perhaps that process is faster

ghostscript can generate pcl from postscript ... and then you can 
feed it to the driver

There are many printer specific bugs that require a windows printer 
driver to make postscript printing work properly


Bad news for me! I'm working on a new version of a huge application 
for a customer, and I was about to rebuild their printing in a couple 
of months. I planned to use the rebol postscript dialect.

Geomol, I built a printer abstraction system called system-print 
for my apps. It's not finished, but for what it does it works sort 
of OK. You can choose printing method via a GUI and it auto-detects 
Ghostscript and uses it if necessary.

http://rebol.hmkdesign.dk/files/system-print.png

It supports currently print to file, print to LPT, print to Ghostscript, 
print to screen (as in screenshot), print to ethernet printer and 
to a custom network printer server made in REBOL for some simple 
printer sharing.

There is also a print queue system, which you can opt to use, if 
you don't want to print directly.

http://rebol.hmkdesign.dk/files/system-print-queue.png

you feed a postscript layout through a parser, which fills in dynamic 
values and then it's run through postscript.r and then it's fed through 
system-print to the appropriate printing method.

the first part can probably be replaced with your own stuff

the downside with this system is that I'm still not using straight 
native windows printing. the good side is that it offers many alternative 
solutions for printing.

it is largely oriented towards use on Win98/XP.

I can release the code for you, if you're interested.

another advantage is that it's fairly simple to add a new method. 
it took 20 minutes to add Ghostscript printing via the win32pr driver 
and when it was added, I could print anything, which is a nice thing 
about this abstraction.

so does using %//prn work any better than using echo??

I don't know. I don't have the HP1200 anymore. :-)

Can you put images into postscript ?

yes, jpg, gif, bmp and I believe png is also supported.

but not image! yet

Well we can save/bmp

So you could use  save/bmp #{} to-image face

for those faces which have DRAW blocks, as a temporary measure.

so it saves it as a bmp in memory?

I was wrong. There is image! support, although this was not brought 
out in the dialect (strange). Problem is right now that Ghostscript 
refuses to display postscripts with images from to-postscripts.

Yes, it saves as a bmp bitmap in the binary specified, so no need 
for intermediate file.