What do you use for printing retro computer programs with a non-standard ASCII, with todays software and hardware?
I can get a edited bit mapped font to work under windows 10, but for the life of me I cannot
find a way to down load that font to the printer.( cannon tr4500). At one time evey PC printer
would have some sort of downloadable font setup.
What are the amswers other than ‘reboot and run the app again’?
Make a screencap and print as image.
Ok for longer lists that is no solution. I used to print 4 or more pages on one.
Now I have to use glasses anyway.
Windows printing really only knows about images, so downloading fonts is something that Windows can’t use.
All depends hows “strange” the character set is. Making a bitmap “kinda-sorta” TTF, installing it and printing from your favourite text editor might work. Are all the computer’s glyphs covered by Unicode? Maybe some kind of converter could work.
If this is a once-off uniques system, it’ll be a lot of work. But for well-known retro systems, there will be a way alerady.
I still need to print the font, from the retro hardware. The serial printer I have for that
does not support down loaded fonts, so I am using just 7 bit ascii again. 8 bit
ascii does not support the ≠ so I can not use a conversion program. Unicode I think
supports the C64 and Pet and BBC computers, but not sure if you can still find a printer
for them.
I think, the best option by now ist to have a Pi Zero or similar as a print server, which interprets the printing commands and composes an image to print.
Regarding C64 and PET and Unicode: While Unicode finally supports all the basic PETSCII characters, there is no notion of reverse text/video in Unicode, which may be important, while printing from a Commodore 8-bit. Moreover, there was quite a variety of Commodore printers with various sizes of character matrices (which may be important for printing raw bit patterns, column by column.) And there was, of course, often support for Centronics-style printers as an unofficial standard.
Again, the best way to handle this that I can think of is to emulate this on a print server. – A general retro print server with various target printers to select from may be a worthwhile project.
Ah, that’s not the question you asked. Whole different set of issues