On Oct 29, 9:33*am, "Don" wrote:
"Dave Liquorice" wrote in message

ll.net...



On Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:16:23 -0700 (PDT), Calvin wrote:

I long for a 7-pin dot matrix!

Does it have to 7 pin? 9 pin are still available but cheap they are not
compared to inkjets. A quick google in the UK on dot matrix 9 pin
produced:

http://www.printerland.co.uk/acatalog/9_Pin.html

Which shows a range of what is available.

--
Cheers
Dave.

I acquired a Panasonic KX-P1131 24 pin multimode printer when my local GP
moved to a "Health Centre" (spit). An excellent piece of kit using either
tractor paper or single sheets. The print cartridge costs a tenner & lasts
for years (literally) and are supposed to print something in the region of 6
million characters.

I would have thought there would be loads of 'em floating about given that
they were standard printers used by the NHS.

Don.

Any 9 pin dot matrix will work with the same commands fed to a 7 pin.
The only difference is the internally stored font. Might require
setting the DIP switches correctly, but theyre simple enough that even
with no manual you can quickly figure it out.

Could you send your data line by line to another hand coded app (eg in
basic or C) which does nothing but get the line of data and spit it
out to the parallel port, adding a return & linefeed character at the
end. It would be elementary to write that in Basic. IOW bypass any
windows printer driver entirely.

DM ribbon carts can be modded to reink themselves over and over again.
Felt pad where the ribbon's pulled past, hole in top of cart over pad,
and 50/50 paraffin plus ink, eg endorsing or printer's ink. A roll of
paper would probably be easier to get than fanfold.

9 pin machines are much more robust than 24 pinners, if the historic
letter quality is ok.

The hammering of a DM churning its way through a big job is one thing
I dont miss.


NT