ImageWriter Interpreter

I always liked the Apple imagewriter printers, probably because we used them at school, and because they were always closely matched with the apple ii. So I thought I'd see if I could interpret some of their ESC codes. The code just implements enough to make some pictures and maybe some pica 10 cpi text.

I seem to have some trouble getting the full 8 bits of data out of the Apple II version of the New Print Shop running under emulation. I was using AppleWin under Wine under knoppix to output the data. It probably didn't help that the New Print Shop would crash when trying out some of the different interface cards. I look at the data and it seems to be missing the high bit (MSB) and the maximum value has 7F.

The code is really ugly with plenty of vestigial junk from my jx80 interpreter. Again, just a proof of concept, and more for fun than anything else.

Looking closely at the ribbons I notice that they have Red, Blue and Yellow to make RYB colors, not CMYK. But I'll cheat a little and treat it as CMYK anyway. I can't wrap my head around the RYB to CMYK conversion just now.

It's interesting that the CUPS linux drivers don't seem to support the color printing ability of the Imagewriter II. Windows doesn't seem to support the color printing capability either with the C.Itoh 8510 driver. Where's the color printing love??? Maybe it's just too low-resolution. *sigh* Next step: Fire up winuae and see if I can make some color printouts.

Runs best under chrome, ok under firefox/iceweasel, and probably terrible under internet explorer (because I don't test it with internet explorer).




imagewriter javascript