Printing to PDF, either in emulation or hardware?

[Starman]

Hi all,

Just for the hell of it, I started looking at printing options for the A8 with regards to modern printers. In a previous life, I wrote printer drivers (if you own a Mac, one of my drivers is still installed w/the OS), and I'm not real keen on doing that for the A8 because PPD files give me a rash (and it's just a big pile of 'nope'). However, I was thinking about writing data to a PDF file. It's not *that* bad, and you can leave all the ugliness to whatever you use to print PDF files. On one hand, you have LIST "P:", and on the other, you have Print Shop.

 

My question is - is there a way to capture raw binary printer output? There weren't too many A8 printers out there so there can't be a plethora of formats to work with.

 

So, if you wanted to create a device, let's say F: (is F: used?), there has to be a way to capture the raw data, parse it, and turn it into something for a PDF. Has anyone looked into this? I did some reading on here and saving to PDF doesn't seem to work for every kind of task, which would make sense without a proper driver. But, there has to be a way to look at the data and turn it into something.

 

Anyway, thinking out loud.

[Rybags]

Altirra lets you have a printer output window and Atari800Win+ allows printing to a file that then gets opened in Notepad.

OK for text but probably not real good for graphical stuff or output full of printer commands.

 

I've got Foxit PDF creator installed on my PC and it has a PDF writer dummy device which allows printing to a PDF file.

I've not used it in any way so can't really comment on it.

 

PDF has the advantage that it's "portable" but the disadvantage in that they can be a near total PITA to do editing on.

Whether a virtual driver could take Atari print output and create anything useful, I've got no idea though.