Good point Adam.... It is true that some inkjet printers (like the HP 5xx series) do understand PCL level 3 which includes the ASCII commands listed at: http://204.210.50.240/techref/default.asp?url=language\pcl\asciiprn.htm and the Form Feed would be necessary to get the printer to print the page. If anybody knows where the format for the data sent to the winprinters is listed, please let me know. The only source of this technology seems to be http://www.pcltools.com and the site owner does make his living selling solutions like this (at reasonable prices) so I doubt he will reveal his sources (and I wouldn't ask him to). James Newton mailto:jamesnewton@geocities.com phone:1-619-652-0593 http://techref.homepage.com NOW OPEN (R/O) TO NON-MEMBERS! Members can add private/public comments/pages ($0 TANSTAAFL web hosting) PICLIST guide: http://204.210.50.240/techref/default.asp?url=piclist.htm -----Original Message----- From: pic microcontroller discussion list [mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU]On Behalf Of M. Adam Davis Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 1999 9:41 AM To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Subject: Re: [OT] do inkjets and laser printers accept ASCII? There are two issues to consider: 1) All laser printers and some (few) inkjet/bubblejet printers need to see a form feed character before printing a page. 2) Some printers have no brains, ie, they don't know how to take ascii input and form characters on the page, they only put dots where the computer tells them to. Often referred to as winprinters, they require certian commands and codes to be sent to print anything. Chances are, since you aren't getting garbage output, that you need to send a form feed (or a few line feeds, ie, it won't print until it has a few lines of text to print, since the print head may be larger than 1 or two lines of text) for it to react. Let's see... ascii 11 (decimal) is line feed, 13 is carraige return, I think 10 is form feed, but don't hold me to that. Of course, you could always read the printer manual, but chances are it doesn't have any low level info. They don't document 'em like they used to. -Adam Mark Skeels wrote: > > PIC People, > > I have an application where I want to send ASCII text to an inexpensive > inkjet printer's parallel port. However, it seems that it ignores my ASCII > output; the same device connected to a dot matrix printer does fine. > > Can you shed any light on this? > > Mark