Nathaniel D. Daw writes:
>I have an old stylewriter (original) printer that I was thinking of
>hooking up to my (pentium) netbsd box, and I wondered if any of you guys
>have experience driving such a printer. In particular, I need to know
>what kind of serial port settings will allow me to communicate with it,
>and I need to know what ghostscript output driver (if any) it is
>compatible with. 

I have written a NetBSD driver for the original StyleWriter.  It's not
integrated with ghostscript, but the expected setup uses ghostscript to
generate a simple raster file which is piped to the driver program.  (I
didn't use the ghostscript framework because I couldn't figure out how
to enable two- way communication with the printer, which is necessary
for this printer.)

The original StyleWriter expects the serial port to run at 57600,
N-8-1, _no_ hardware or software flow control.  The driver polls the
printer for single-byte status codes that indicate whether the printer
is ready for more data, still printing, out of paper, etc.  AFAIK, the
printer control codes are completely proprietary and undocumented.  I
figured out enough to make the printer work by snooping the serial
ports while the Apple drivers (under MacOS) printed some simple test
pages.  If the codes do match something that's actually documented
(like the bubblejet), I'd love to hear about it.  I know that the
StyleWriters use bubblejet print engines, but I was under the
impression that Apple decided to be different when implementing their
controller firmware...

>I know that newer stylewriters work with canon
>bubblejet drivers; is the same true of my Stylewriter I?

Hmm...  Do you know which particular model(s) work with the bubblejet
drivers?  Also, do you know if documents describing the bubblejet
protocols are available online?

Thanks,
-- monroe
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Monroe Williams                                      monroe@teleport.com