Latest Software Developments

[RWAP]

We are busy at the moment working on a few enhancements which have been requested by customers.

a) Use of ramdisk for temporary storage of the raw data files between the capture routine and the printer emulators. This will help improve performance.
b) A plain text printer emulator. For speed where output is only plain text with no graphics or control codes. This is quicker than using the Epson printer emulator to handle just plain text - and has the benefit that you can use a built in CUPS processor to print the captured plain text. We are looking at using a cut down PDF generator just for this, which should be quicker than the full featured PDF generator used in the Epson printer emulator, should you want to retain a PDF version of the printout.

c) One of our customers has come across an oddity when capturing the data which was previously sent to a HP LaserJet II printer. The main issues here were around the size of the 12cpi font. For some reason, to get the correct output, we have had to replace the PCL codes for 12cpi printing with 17cpi !!
We also found that some pages were missing the top line on the replacement USB HP printer (although they printed correctly on a Canon printer, so that was to do with the printed area available). Finally, we found that the GhostPCL program we use to conver PCL codes to PDF was sometimes assuming the printout was A4 landscape.

We have therefore added handling for custom code within the capture routine to handle the third option - which searches for specific control codes / text strings and replaces them with other control codes.

Obviously the changes for (a) will be of most interest.