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flybywiresim / aircraft

The A32NX & A380X Project are community driven open source projects to create free Airbus aircraft in Microsoft Flight Simulator that are as close to reality as possible.
https://flybywiresim.com
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support for POS printer / Terminal printer for remote MCDU #6443

Open andrejetcat opened 2 years ago

andrejetcat commented 2 years ago

Aircraft Version

Development

Description

I have a Terminal/Receip Printer (Netum NT-1809DD) connected with my PC.

When I want to print a normal Notepad dokument, it works well. Also normal Word documents are well printed. e.g. when I manually copy and paste a METAR in word or notepad, the POS printer will print it. But if I select the POS Printer with the MCDU interface and hit the "print" button, only a piece of white paper comes out of the POS without content. The Print function only works with "normal" DinA4 printers i think!? Maybe a format-thing?

It would be awesome, if we could print METARS/TAFs/ATIS etc via a small terminal printer.

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tyler58546 commented 2 years ago

Can your printer print PDFs?

andrejetcat commented 2 years ago

no, only word, and wordpad dokuments. Does the MCDU server create a PDF document for printing?

tracernz commented 2 years ago

It works with my HP A799, although better with the font size tweaked a little larger.

There is also a raw mode for these printers which works best but I didn’t find a good node library for this… they’re all broken or unsuitable in different ways.

andrejetcat commented 2 years ago

I think the simplest way is to sent out the printer command as a simple .txt/.odt document for those kinds of printers. Is that possible?

tyler58546 commented 2 years ago

Does the MCDU server create a PDF document for printing?

Yes, in fact you can find the last generated one at %TEMP%\a32nxPrint.pdf.

andrejetcat commented 2 years ago

I found the document but my 58mm terminal printer do not print .pdf´s. Maybe there could be an option to create normal word dokuments for the printouts. @tracernz did you set your printer for the pdf´s?

tracernz commented 2 years ago

I found the document but my 58mm terminal printer do not print .pdf´s. Maybe there could be an option to create normal word dokuments for the printouts. @tracernz did you set your printer for the pdf´s?

No, to my surprise it just worked.

ssewell commented 2 years ago

Something seems off. The Netum site shows examples of PDF printing and the print drivers should rasterize the file contents before sending it to the printer. Do you have the Netum drivers currently installed? What happens if you try to open a PDF and print it directly (outside of the MCDU server)?

andrejetcat commented 2 years ago

@ssewell yes, i reinstalled the driver several times. Same happends, if I manually print the .pdf document from the %TEMP%\a32nxPrint.pdf file. Then, the problem is on my end and maybe I will try another printer. Thank you for your help :)

andrejetcat commented 2 years ago

It works with my HP A799, although better with the font size tweaked a little larger.

There is also a raw mode for these printers which works best but I didn’t find a good node library for this… they’re all broken or unsuitable in different ways.

@tracernz how do you make the font size bigger? i try to set a new in the SumatraPDF-settings.txt, but it seems to be the wrong. Maybw my printer works, when i select "print as photo" instead of "print as text. I will try it with a bigger font size