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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

Maybe those of you not interested in printing with netpbm should set your 
filters to throw out my mail.

netpbmtolj prints 4x as large as it should not only with the deskjet but 
also with the laserjet (IIp).

pbmreduce 4 produces something the right size but fuzzy

pnmscale .25 produces something nice looking the right size but pbmtolj
says it is not a pbm.  I read the man page and it is a pgm file and there 
is no way to directly produce pbm instead because if there is a 
combination of black and white dots getting scaled it produces grey.

They suggested pgmtopbm, which produced a pbm that printed fuzzy.
They also suggested pbmreduce, which prints fuzzy.

I copied my taxes fuzzily and wonder what to try next (other than pnmtops
and gs to print pbms).

I was able to print with an alias or script:
pbmreduce 4 $1 | pbmtolj > /dev/lp0


pnmscale probably produces slightly prettier output this way but
unfortunately it is no longer printable with netpbm

For copying via a scanner, there might be a way to scan and reduce to 1/4 
size at the same time, but what do you do with files other people send?

Best bet with netpbm printing is the epson escp/2 if you don't care about 
it printing a bit small.

pbmtoppa left to try.

I ran a long printer cable from this room to the laser printer and 
discovered it is fussy about cables (I was told lp0 off line and paper 
out) but you can hook up a printer extension cable (AKA scanner cable) to 
a bidirectional short printer cable, in fact you can leave the extension 
cable plugged into lp0 and use it instead of a switch box to test printers 
without crawling under the desk.

On Sun, 3 Apr 2005, sindi keesan wrote:

> I used
> pnmscale 1.2 testfile1.pbm > testfile65.pbm
> to make the 900K file into something 6/5 as big that turned out to be
> 10 MB (!).  I could view it with zgv but when I tried to print with
> pbmtoescp2 testfile65.pbm > /dev/lp0
> 'bad magic number - not a pbm file'
>
> So pnmscale of netpbm appears to produce some format of pbm which netpbm's 
> pbmtoescp2 does not recognize.  pnmscale is not suitable for small hard 
> drives.
>
> Three down (dot-matrix Panasonic not usable, Deskjet 540 usable but fuzzy, 
> Epson Stylus usable but small), one to go (laserjet).
Sindi Keesan