My first questions - ordered my RP today

[PaulY]

Hi all

I'm very excited about receiving my Retro Printer having ordered it today and am looking forward to joining the user community.

In advance of getting it, I have been reading through the excellent manual today and have some novice questions, that someone might be able to help answer for me?

1- In order to print the "£" symbol will I need to change the default Epson character set configuration from PC437-US to PC850-INT or something else?

2- Is the .PNG file created in response to a Screenshot and a image file print? If not what is it?

3- I assume that, should I choose to edit the configuration files with "Notepad ++" on my Windows 11 Laptop that will be fine. as long as I remembered to save the file using the UNIX format option Notepad ++ offers?

Thanks

Paul

[RWAP]

Hi Paul,

Welcome to the forums.

1- In order to print the "£" symbol will I need to change the default Epson character set configuration from PC437-US to PC850-INT or something else?

If the £ symbol worked on a printer previously, it will work on the Retro-Printer's emulators. I know that you are going to use the Epson emulator, so it depends on the software and interface you are using. Software written for use with Epson printers typically use a series of ESC/P printer control codes to change the character set, then print the £ symbol and then switch back to the default character set - using

ESC R 3 (switch to UK international character set)
print character code 35 (£)
ESC R 1 (switch back to US character set)

As you have previously used an Epson printer, you are best to check what the default character table is set to on the printer (in the DIP switches) and adopt the same setting for the Retro-Printer.

2- Is the .PNG file created in response to a Screenshot and a image file print? If not what is it?

This is probably one of the hardest questions, as you seem to be mixing up what the computer understands as an image and what a printer understands.

With an Epson printer output for example, the printer expects a series of control codes which "describe" image data - this is NOT in any of the formats understood by a computer as it is designed to control the print head.

A computer image consists of banded data - one pixel high x the width of the image. The data can then be compressed using various methods, such as PNG or JPG compression to reduce storage requirements.

The printer however, prints using a series of bands which are either 9 or 24 pins high (or even 48 pins), followed by a line feed or carriage return at the end of each band - the computer image data is therefore re-written by the computer software to change it to this format, and surround it by a series of control codes telling the printer about things such as colour, dot density, how to move the printer head etc. Original printers would print each individual byte's worth of graphic data as it was received (although this did change with some of the more complicated Epson ESC/P2 graphics modes).

Our Retro-Printer emulators have to interpret the printer data - in the same way that an Epson printer creates an "image" of the page on the paper, we build up a PNG image file of the page internally - that is then inserted into a PDF for printing out.

We have to do it in this way because most modern printers are dumb printers and closer to the original computer image (!) in that they expect a graphics print out of the completed page and will not print anything until they have a full page of data.

3- I assume that, should I choose to edit the configuration files with "Notepad ++" on my Windows 11 Laptop that will be fine. as long as I remembered to save the file using the UNIX format option Notepad ++ offers?

Yes, you can do this - you MUST retain the Unix line endings (character 10 only) and not the WIndows line endings.

The other option is to use Bitvise SSH Client to connect to the Retro-Printer and then in the command window you use the in-built nano editor to edit the files, eg enter the command:

nano /root/config/emulation