ProForma Epson ESC/P2 Colour Drivers

[RWAP]

Day 9 of the RWAP Software 30th Anniversary celebrations and we have decided to release our own ProForma Epson ESC/P2 Colour Drivers as public domain, for use with the ProWeSs ProForma system.

This provides up to 720dpi full colour printing to ESC/P2 compatible printers (or to a modern printer if you have QPCPrint on your PC), from within LineDesign and any other ProWeSs based programs.

As well as providing high-speed output in both monochrome and full colour mode, you can choose to print using 180dpi, 360dpi or 720dpi. There is also standard colour printing and a colour replacement driver for use with LineDesign.

More details appear on the SInclair QL Wiki

This was an interesting exercise at the time - it was actually my first foray into C programming (!) - I took the original Epson printer driver from Progs as a source and then re-wrote the C code to ignore blank lines and use TIFF binary compression to produce high speed printing; as well as adding the 720dpi mode.

It taught me a lot about Epson printers as well as C programming.

The drivers and full source codes are attached below (I will add them to the QL Homepage shortly). Also included is my attempt to program the 1440dpi mode - however, for some reason, I never managed to get this to work and can only assume that there was something different in how Epson printers handle this print mode.

[RWAP]

It would probably be worth setting up the C sources for this (and maybe ProWeSs?) on something like github so that even non-QLers could possibly input into this...

[Cristian]

Thanks!