Creating dummy ASCII driver for thermal printer (Star TSP600)

[Luis Da Costa]

Hello everyone,

I am new here, so if this is not the right place to post this please tell me.

I bought a thermal Star TSP600 for my POS installation. Normally this device has a official website (licensed under GPLv2 if I'm not wrong, which is pretty cool and useful), but it only works (under Gnu/Linux and Mac, not on Windows) with the USB and Ethernet version... and as you may already imagine my version is a Serial one.

Long story short. After a long time understanding how all of this should work, I've found a way to print. Simply by doing this :

echo "Hello World" >> /dev/ttyUSB0

It works nice (with no accents as expected) but this isn't a solution for a POS installation since I need the software (proprietary) to work with this printer (by using Cups as you may already understood).

Under Fedora 18 I've managed to make it print something under cups using one of those generic drivers :
- PostScript
- Raw Queue
- Others from other printers randomly chosen.

After installing them with one of the generic drivers, I've tested with gedit and it would print, sometimes slowly, sometimes faster, but in all the cases I couldn't even understand what was printed (the best I got was one of the drivers that printed in big fonts all the settings used for printing like the font used, the size used etc..).

So my question is (as I know programming, and need to have this printer working until the end of this month, and I am trying to not use Windows, since it works in there perfectly), is it possible to create a dummy driver for this kind of situations ? Or is it possible to edit the original ppd from this printer in order to add the serial support ?

If yes, could anyone help me do this ? (Or just help me find a better solution that would work under cups in order for the POS software to recognize the printer and use it).

Thanks in Advance for all the help. And sorry for my horrible English.

Best Regards,
Luis Da Costa