Warning: ESC/P retired

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Or Perfidious Epson. It appears that Epson has quietly (one might say
surreptitiously) retired the ESC/P printer control language in favor of
something called ESC/P raster, whose exact specs are a deep secret. The
Epson people say that DOS printing is therefore no longer supported.
Whether that means really not supported, or just that they don't want to
have to answer questions about it, and won't, I'm not sure. A Google
search turned up a flurry of questions about whether or not one could
print to such printers from Linux on various Linux discussion lists, with
no consensus: some said you could with just a bit of tweaking, others
that you couldn't at all, and others that all you could get would be
plain text: no bold, itals, etc. The latest Epson printers do have Mac
OSX drivers, and OSX is *nix, so that would seem to indicate Linux
usablity, but I know too little about how Linux handles printing to have
a guess if that augurs well or not for DOS capability.
	Linguistic digression, that may be of interest to some here: A couple of
those Linux posts were in German, and not only is my German very rusty, I
neve had much technical vocabulary there. So, knowing I would likely get
gibberish, I clicked on "Translate this page." As expected, gibberish:
"bold" came out "fat", "italic," "italicy," and a couple of
classic
extended adjective constructions ("the-on-the-table-lying book," "the
owing-to-the-World-War-befallen destruction of capital") were rendered
verbatim. Actually, remembering a fair amount of German grammar and
syntax, I was able to glean the meaning more quickly than if I had had to
look up all the unknown words in a dictionary, but anyone who didn't
would have been "so klug as wie zufor." If human translators are, as the
Italian proverb has it, traitors, what shall we say of translators that
are algorithms? The mind boggles and one's vocabulary--even mine--is
beggered seeking sufficient--and sufficienly opprobrious--epithets to
categorize them.
Patricia