Printing letters typed immediately

[macpaint2009]

Hello all,

Haven't been on this board since about 2002, but I'm glad to see it still thriving. I'm planning to set up a Mac Plus I have with an Imagewriter to basically function as a typewriter -- you press a key, and the printer immediately prints it out. I guess I'd also be open to a set up where you type a line, hit enter, and the printer prints all of that. Anyone know of a piece of software that would accommodate this, or am I going to have to try to build it myself?

 

[porter]

The imagewriters works as both ASCII printers and as bitmapped printers.

If you talk to it over a serial port, you get the behaviour you describe, except I would have expected it to buffer a whole line before printing it.

If you use the QuickDraw driver it gives you draft, and two bitmap qualities.

 

[macpaint2009]

Cool, thanks for that suggestion. I was wondering if something like that would be necessary. I might try Keyboard2Serial, a shareware extension I found, that may save me having to try to figure out some of the communication myself. Beyond that, has anyone interacted with an Imagewriter directly in its ASCII mode? Any resources to point me to? Do I need to start reading up on how to configure it to be a terminal output or anything? I'll probably come back with more specific questions at some point, but I'd love a good starting point :beige:

 

[macpaint2009]

Hm, looks like I answered my own question, duh. The Imagewriter II Technical Reference Manual is clearly what I want. On to Amazon...!

What about personal experiences, though? Any tips out there for me to keep in mind?

 

[luddite]

ZTerm would be my best guess... though I think you'd have to go line-by-line.

 

[macpaint2009]

Follow up to this for anyone who was interested: the shareware control panel Keyboard2Serial is pretty useful for this kind of thing. If you just direct all of the keyboard input to the printer port, it's very easy to send commands to the Imagewriter II.

You can get that control panel here: http://www.polar-orbit.com/downloads/keyboard2serial.sit.hqx

You might need to contact the developer to get a serial number, because he said he hadn't had an order in 10 years. You can find his contact info here: http://www.luszcz.com/

As for how to make the printer do what you like, definitely get a copy of the Imagewriter II Technical Reference manual (ISBN 978-0201177664) on Amazon -- it is very clear on how to do everything you could want to do with an Imagewriter.