HP Laser Jet Plus, Hercules B&W card drivers

[Wolf N. Paul]

In article <1007 at twitch.UUCP> rvk at twitch.UUCP ( Bob Kline) writes:
>1. if anyone has used an HP Laser Jet Printer with Microport Unix, please
>   tell me how to do it.

It really depends on what you want to do with it. If all you want to do
is dump listings to it, you just plug it in, make sure that the baud rate
etc. are set correctly if using a serial port, and off you go. the only
thing to watch out for in this case is that in its default font (Courier
10 cpi) the HP LJ is incapable of printing 66 lines per 11-inch page,
and you should probably use pr instead of cat in the lp interface script.

You can also set up two separate interface scripts, one for Courier, the other
for Lineprinter, and echo the necessary printer control codes (from the
LJ Technical Reference Manual) to set the appropriate font.

Packages like Textware's Tplus or Elan's Eroff come with appropriate lp
interface scripts, and software to control the printer more finely.

The recently posted Nroff TERM Table utility also includes a sample tabLJ
file for use with nroff.

>2. a friend says that no driver exists for a Hercules black and white
>   monitor card on Microport Unix.  he says that this was more or less
>   verified by the company.  if so, I would be interested in hearing from
>   anyone who has found a way around this.

Again, depends what you want to do. Microport UNIX will work just fine with
the Hercules card (or compatibles) in TEXT MODE, without a special driver.
Since I am not into graphics, I have no idea about Hercules Graphics mode.


Wolf Paul
wnp at chinet