Date   : Sun, 28 Nov 2004 13:49:15 +0000
From   : "Dr. David Alan Gilbert" <beeb@...>
Subject: Re: Printers

* Jonathan Graham Harston (jgh@...) wrote:
> > Message-ID: <157.447bf1d9.2ed51dc7@...>
>  
> RWAPSoftware@... wrote:
> > Just exactly what do people do if they want to print out from a BBC 
> > nowadays - most inkjets on the market will not work with plain text as
>  
> Don't they? Since when? Have you actually tried this, or have you just
> beleive what some sales-bot has told you?

Really some printers are dumb enough not to be able to print plain text
any more.

> I am fed up of FUD-merchants[1] saying "this is impossible..." when what
> they mean is "I don't understand this, I want you to buy product X and
> stop asking me things"

Yeh, well perhaps you should realise that not all printers are the same.

As an example the Samsung ML-4500 laser, with a good old fashioned
parallel port on won't print text (I've just tried it on mine);
neither is it postscript; it just takes a raw bit image and the
host has to render it. (In my case from Linux).

Probably the most useful recommendation is that you can still buy
good old fashioned impact dot-matrix printers - Staples still had
them last time I looked; people still use them for multipart
stationary.
Many inkjets will do plain text - but I suspect there are some
dumb enough not to be able to.

A less-cheap laser should be able to render text from the port
raw; but there really are ones dumb enough not to be able to do it.
(Hey it was under £70 - you can't expect it to have much brains).

Dave

 -----Open up your eyes, open up your mind, open up your code -------   
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