Pre-Purchase question - HP6L

[anon819450]

Hi,

We have old instrument at my work. They have parallel printer port on them and the only printers I know could work with the instruments are the HP6L or the Canon LBP-8.
,
We are willing to buy the v4 Retro-Printer Pre-Assembled Complete Unit with Remote Assistance along with Standard Parallel Port to Centronics Cable to try it out, and let know the developpers if it works or not with those old instruments.

The parallel port looks like this:



Is there any chance someone could take a look at the spec of the printer and see if the retro-printer should fit our needs? If it does, we might buy a few of them to stretch the life of our good working instrument.

[RWAP]

I can't find the spec for the Canon LBP-8, but I assume it would be using HP PCL emulation anyway, to match the HP6L.

The HP6L supports HP PJL (Printer Job Language) which is a mixture of HP PCL and a Job Control section at the start of each printout.

To emulate HP printing, we use Ghostscript which interprets the raw data for us and is well maintained. Unfortunately, Ghostscript does not appear to work well with the HP PJL sections, so we do strip those out of the retained data.

For most print jobs, this appears to work, but we have recently come across an instance where the PJL must have set up some form of scaling for the page (as the text section printed fine, but a graph was at least 1/4 the intended size).

We do work around most of these type of issues, so the simple answer is that the Retro-Printer will certainly capture the data and create a PDF which you can access remotely, or print directly to any USB / network printer.

The other option if all else fails is to use the Retro-Printer in USB Passthrough mode, where the incoming data is simply echoed to an attached USB printer so you could use a modern HP LaserJet.

[anon819450]

That is a very good answer for me. I will order right away.

The only problem is the item listing seems to have expired.

[RWAP]

That is a very good answer for me. I will order right away.

The only problem is the item listing seems to have expired.

Apologies, I did not relist them when I was waiting on the receipt of some more Raspberry Pi units:

https://www.sellmyretro.com/offer/detai ... a%29-62922
and
https://www.sellmyretro.com/offer/detai ... a%29-62923

The second one has a USB-RTC module with it to maintain the correct date and time on the PDF files if the module will not be connected to the internet.

[anon819450]

I've used the contact form to ask an invoice.

[RWAP]

I've used the contact form to ask an invoice.

OK no problems