(I used to mirror the Alps mailing lists, but it's been a long while since I was able to keep up with Yahoo's ever-changing interface, so I no longer provide it. I believe the Yahoo search facilities are adequate now.)

Unix driver for MicroDry Printers

This page contains a driver, in the form of a filter taking PPM input, for the Micro-Dry printers sold by Citizen, Alps and Oki.

The driver and documentation are contained in a gzipped tar file ppmtomd-1.6.tar.gz (112kB).

News and Changes

2009-09-09: Amazing, people are still using this program. So I've made the two line changes required for it to compile on modern systems using libnetpbm rather than the old pbmplus. The odd bug or two has been fixed in the last four years also.

Plans

I want to be able to exploit bidirectional comms to get status readback etc.
Actually, several years ago I hacked up a bidi monitoring script. It's available here, without any documentation. The stuff about daemons and spooling is for my local environment (I attach the printer to a NAS box, run this program as a daemon on the NAS box, and connect to it from my main laptop). The routines that actually deal with the printer protocol should be obvious.
If you want help to actually use this program yourself, I'm willing to tidy it up - but not until someone asks!
Here it is: getstat.pl.
Some of the halftoning has scope for improvement.

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Last modified: Mon May 29 13:10:02 BST 2023