ESC/P24-J84 Support?

[defor]

I am very interested in the Retro-Printer, but I'm having trouble assessing whether you support the ESC/P24-J84 command set. I have some Japanese products that will only print to a printer with support for this protocol. Wikipedia's statements on the different ESC/P variants makes it appear that ESC/P2 replaced ESC/P24-J84, but I'm not sure. Can you confirm, and if not, if there are issues interpreting the data being printed, can you assist in adding support?

Thank you!

[RWAP]

HI Defor - welcome to the forums.

I have not come across the ESC/P24-J84 protocol before and wonder if there is a description of the control codes / programming reference guide for this?

I should imagine that it will be mainly the same as the ESC/P2 protocol used on the later versions of the Epson inkjets, but possibly with additional commands to support Japanese. Certainly we do not have a Japanese language font which would be something we would need to create.

Capturing the data itself should not pose a problem - it is a matter of writing an emulator which then interprets the data (if there are indeed any differences between ESC/P24-J84 and ESC/P2 control codes) for which we may have to make educated guesses based on the original printout, and the control codes being used if there is no programming reference guide.

We have quite a bit of experience of creating bespoke printer emulators now, including for the Epson ESC/P. ESC/P2 and LPS-300 printer range (there was no programming reference available for the last one of these), plus a wide range of other printer makes.

Creating a Japanese font may be more of an issue as it does take quite a bit of time to design the fonts and different styles (in 8 x 16 pixel bitmaps).

Of course, the issue is more to do with the time taken and costs involved in creating new printer emulators.

[defor]

Looks like it works out of the box...
Print speed is ABYSMAL, but i'm not sure if this is true for an actual printer as well- (3+ min/page) if anyone has any suggestions, unless this is normal (Sorry, I never had parallel printers back in the day, only serial and networked, so I'm not sure how reasonable this is.) Are there any realtime diagnostics i can look at to see if there';s something getting hung up or just waiting for a timeout while it's receiving data?

Wired up the custom cable for the Sony MiniDisc personal document file (PDF) devices, took some photos:
https://x.com/defor/status/1769688024319660120?s=20

Also need to see if i need to adjust something about page size as printed pages seem to roll over to a second page, both in the PDF that's generated, and what's sent to the network printer.

Thanks again!

[RWAP]

Glad it works out of the box.

Speed of Printing
The speed of printing is limited by several factors:

a) People are used to dot matrix printers starting to print as soon as any data is sent to the printer. However, modern printers expect a graphics image of the full rendered page, so we have to create a PDF in memory and then send the PDF to the modern printer once it is complete (Windows does this rendering for a printer connected to a Windows PC).

Time to create the PDF is probably no longer than actually sending the whole of the original output to a dot matrix printer.

b) Because of the fact that we cannot do direct printing of the data (unless you set the mode to usb passthrough), we have to guess when the end of a print job exists. Current released versions of the software wait until "timeout" seconds (normally 4 seconds). If data is not received in that time, then we can assume the end of a print job - you can reduce that timeout setting, but it can lead to pages being split up if the original program is busy doing something, such as rendering graphics.

We have a beta version of the software which also allows you to use the switch on top of the unit to signal that the print job has finished.

Page Size
It may well be that the original printer works on the Epson 9 pin standard for line spacing. Try setting:
/root/config/epson_pins
to 9

You may also need to adjust the margins, by altering:
/root/config/default_margins
(try a setting of None)

[RWAP]

For information

Epson support got back to me about the programming details for ESC/P24-J84 line of printers. Initially they wanted me to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement and warned the documentation was only available in Japanese. Obviously I could use an online translation tool.

Weirdly, when asked to progress further (ie for them to send me a NDA for signature), they then stated that the details are ONLY available within Japan!

Hard to believe that Epson are still so protective about programming information on a printer last produced in the 1990s...

[defor]

That is pretty wild – I also have a later device, but the documentation doesn’t specify what kind of protocol uses at all even though it’s also using the same interface and it’s made by Sony… Is there a way to get a raw capture of what was sent To the virtual printer to diagnose what format it might be? What’s happening is it spitting out hundreds of pages with just a single line or two of gibberish.

[RWAP]

If you can capture the data on the Retro-Printer, send me the raw file and I will have a look to see if it can be deciphered.

[defor]

Sorry, that’s why I was asking – how do I capture the raw data? I may have missed it somewhere in the documentation, and apologies if that’s the case.

[RWAP]

Sorry, that’s why I was asking – how do I capture the raw data? I may have missed it somewhere in the documentation, and apologies if that’s the case.

So long as the retro-printer is connected, it will capture and store the raw data in the folder: /home/pi/data/raw

Even if it does not convert properly, the raw files are still stored (provided the machine recognises the Retro-Printer as a print device!)

Have a look in the manual at how to use Bitvise SSH to connect to the Retro-Printer and access the folder.

Rich