tresf
commented
4 years ago In the Wiki (Printer-Emulators) section, you refer to QPCPrint as a raw printer. That is correct, but it only handles ESC/P2 not ESC/POS.
Corrected, thanks.
You might also like to include my own Retro-Printer hardware (www.retroprinter.com) and its C based ESC/P2 raw printer convertor PrinterToPDF (https://github.com/RWAP/PrinterToPDF)
This looks very useful. The emulator page is intended to offer developers a software emulator when hardware isn't available. A quick, installable CUPS (or Winspool) printer would be a good candidate, we'd love to add it if it becomes available. Due to the barrier to entry (compiling C, editing header files) and lack of downloadable software we won't be adding it at this time, but we'll make sure to recommend this in the edge-case that it's requested.
Note, at the time of writing this, Linux is about 3% of our downloads (Windows is 84%, MacOS is 13%). Popularity is split about 50/50 ways between Raw (ESC/POS and ZPL) and 2D printing methods like PostScript, PDF, etc. ESC/P is a very, very small subset of our raw printing. Those users with the ambition to compile C on Linux for purposes of talking ESC/P to a non-printer would be too much of an edge-case, but we'd love to offer it if a simple, compatible technique is made available. 🍻
Edit: The hardware adapter is neat and something which seems to have a good, valid use-case in the industry. That said, our users would most likely leverage one of our other APIs (HTML, Image, PDF) for this as we tend to fill the gap for web->legacy(raw) or web->modern, not so much web->legacy(printer)->modern. We did recently have a web->legacy(raw) project, but keeping the raw hardware was a strict requirement and involved a two-way communication via RS232 and contained hardware commands which an emulator wouldn't be able to provide (such as talking to a TM-U275 validator).
In the Wiki (Printer-Emulators) section, you refer to QPCPrint as a raw printer. That is correct, but it only handles ESC/P2 not ESC/POS.
You might also like to include my own Retro-Printer hardware (www.retroprinter.com) and its C based ESC/P2 raw printer convertor PrinterToPDF (https://github.com/RWAP/PrinterToPDF)