Conversion of Printstream from Epson (ESC/P, ESC/P2), IBM Proprinter, NEC Pinwriter

[Michael Leimann]

Let me ask some stupid questions.

Dare I?

We are still using some DOS application programmed to print directly on EPSON printers.

Yes, we are. Don't shout at me.

I would very much like to capture and handle the output, which is no problem, because they are running in a virtual environment (VMWare) using a NOVELL NetWare shell anyway.

So we are able to capture the output present that raw printing to a CUPS server. We are performing that for quite a long time and it works well.

CUPS does not understand what to do with it, because it is no PostScript it is ordinary raw ESC/P(2). It can print that to an appropriate printer without any problem but it cannot convert it to PostScript or PDF.

I found two projects that are able to convert ESC/P(2) to other print/file formats:

One is DOSEMU, which itself allows old DOS applications to run under Linux. This is not what we are looking for, because this is to far away from what we are planning to do.

The second one is the PPR Spooler (Page Printer Spooler, http://ppr.trincoll.edu) which development seems to have stopped.

We have been able to partially install the PPR Spooler under a openSuSE 11.0 environment and have tested it's ability to convert ESC/P(2) to PostScript and can confirm that it works well (We converted text with attributes and graphics without any problem).

Now my questions:

Is there a known approach to get the PPR Spooler working together with CUPS?

Is there an alternative way to convert such print stream (ESC/P) to PostScript using CUPS?

Has anyone ever tried to use the filters from PPR Spooler with CUPS?

Regards to everyone

Michael