Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

baslinux - Re: [BL] Printing scanned files

baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Baslinux mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] Printing scanned files
  • Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 15:20:27 +0000 (UTC)

On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, David Moberg wrote:

----- Original Message -----
From: "sindi keesan" <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>

pbmtoepson filename.pbm > /dev/lp0

Printed a few characters, one at the start of each line, and then
beeped, and stopped printing. BL2 and BL3 printed different
garbage.

Maybe a REAL Epson is needed?

Probably. I have no idea what format all these printers take.

The documentation for netpbm is only found online. pbmtoepson has a switch for 9-pin or for newer escp(1) epsons but it did not seem to work. -protocol=escp9 or escp (as opposed to pbmtoescp2 for the stylus). The switch was not recognized.

I have an escp/2 to try eventually. The laser printer appears to have electronic problems rather than a paper jam so I hope the deskjet will work with pbmtolj. (In ghostscript deskjet works as ljet, at least in mono).

OK. If you can get anything to work, let me know and I'll make a new
tarball, with only these included:

pngtopnm
jpegtopnm
giftopnm
tifftopnm
pstopnm

(for conversion, and also vice versa, p?mtojpeg, p?mtogif, etc)

pbmscale
pbmreduce
pnmcrop
pnmmontage
pnmrotate

I will make up a better list after some research.

(editors)

Also, any printer-specific ones that you request.
pbmto epson escp2 lj lps ppa (in your first package already)

******************
---next message---
******************

Image Magick requires a lot of X libraries even to convert and is
rather slow. 1 min per pbm > ps on my 200MHz computer, 99.4% cpu
usage. I am hoping netpbm programs will have fewer dependencies and
not need X.

They do make a good substitute, even if you can't get the printing ones
to work.


pbmtoepson seemed much faster, especially if you can print while it is converting


Xvesa in 8-bit color looks garish - bright red, blue, green in all
the wrong places. On ANY cards. This means you cannot use it with
Abiword or Opera or Links2 if your video chip produces 8-bit color or
less.

Steven seemed to indicate that it's specific to the BL3 version of Xvesa:

8-bit color for Xvesa is PseudoColor. AFAIK the
PseudoColor routine for our version of Xvesa was
non-functional.

The Delilinux Xvesa has the same problems, in BL2. Is there a later version of Xvesa to try?

Re framebuffer, we have one Matrox Millenium II card that is VESA 2.0 and supposedly framebuffer (a more recent sort of XVESA that supports up to 1600 resolution). You would need to make a few changes to the kernel to support it and it looks rather complicated. In addition to 'kernel patches' for S3 Trio64 or Virge, there was mention of using UNIVBE in DOS (like UNIVESA) to upgrade the VESA capabilities of a card before loading linux with loadlin. Maybe you would like to try this out and provide a frame-buffer kernel for 'vesafb'. Matrox will not work with that, needs 'matroxfb' (compiled into the kernel? Or maybe could be modules?).

The Matrox cards are the only ones on a list other than MDA that could be used as the video card in a dual-head system. With two fb devices, you could use con2fb and specify during boot which consoles were used with which video chip and monitor, as well as setting the resolution by mode number (vga=0301). There is an XF68_FBdev X server which supposedly does better than the SVGA one (more resolution?). XF86Config also needed.

Matrox does something odd with memory that allows this. This results in a complete loss of the VGA screen if you do vga=ask and try to scan (power off to fix it), and it crashes DOS viewer Pictview with a 'memory allocation error' on exit. I will not be using it as a primary card with DOS/linux but maybe some day could try using two VGA monitors at once.

The board that won't do resizecons properly with Virge works with Trio64 and Trident and Matrox as expected. In a dual-monitor system the MDA consoles are usable (with cursor) only in 80x25 mode, but you can switch modes to what you want for a while, then back to 80x25 to use the second monitor. I fiddled a bit with BIOS video shadowing which did not help (it may have made things worse to disable it).

fbset can be used to enable framebuffer console scrollback buffering, which normal vga has by default and mda does not have at all. (Shift PageUp or Shift PageDown).

VESA 2.0 cards on a list did not include my Tseng which claims VESA 2.0 but did have PCI cards from ATI, SiS, STB, Riva, Genoa and Hercules. Are all AGP cards VESA 2.0?


David


Sindi
keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page