OKI4DRV(l)OKI4DRV(l)NAMEoki4drv - User space based driver for OKIPAGE 4w, OKI400w, OKIPAGE 4w
PLUS and OKIPAGE 8w Lite printers.
SYNTAXoki4drv [-gmvV] [-s papersize] [-o output] [-d darkness] [-w paper‐
weight] [[file]...]
DESCRIPTIONoki4drv is a user level driver for the OKIPAGE 4w , OKIPAGE 4w PLUS ,
as well as the OKIPAGE 8w Lite GDI (Generic Display Interface) print‐
ers.
It takes PostScript input from some files specified on the command line
or from standard input and renders them through GhostScript's raw bit
device. The GhostScript output will be coded into a data stream appro‐
priate for those printers and spooled page by page sendid directly to
the printer device itself. The default printer device file used is:
/dev/lp0.
WARNING!
Due to the printing technology involved the feeding of the printer with
data imposes some real-time constraints on the run of this program. The
document processing must therefore be done on a page by page basis. The
host system should be fairly well equipped to keep up with the printers
hunger for data. Supposedly an 486 with about 16M bytes of RAM should
do it. But please don't try to use this program with one of those
printers on an in esp. 386SX/16MHz with 4 megs of RAM! I'm personally
using an K6/333MHz with 64M bytes of RAM and can't therefore tell what
the real lower limit is.
However: be warned! Failing to meet those constraints may result in
severe physical damage to the printer! Thought it shouldn't, since I
have been observing those printers ability to stop and resume in the
middle of processing a sheet of paper. It appears that this behavior
involves some control from the computers side, so I can't really at
this stage of developement reproduce it.
Please make sure that the printer is set to EPP or SPP mode in the
BIOS! ECP will fail for reasons I don't want to explain in length
here.
To guarantee a quite continuous data stream, the process of sending the
page image data to the printer is exploring real time and execution
priority manipulation facilities of the underlying operating system. As
a consequence this program must be used in SUID root mode. The second
consequence of this is that it doesn't make sense to use this program
in pure filtering mode under the control of some systems printer spool‐
ing daemon like for example: lpd. Instead you can use the "oki4daemon"
to connect from your spooler over a named pipe into the soft realtime
driver process. See README.oki4daemon in the distribution.
If you expirence problems try first to output the data into a separate
file and thereafter to cat it to the printer at once like this:
oki4drv foo.ps -o temp; cat temp > /dev/lp0.
And make sure that the machine you are using is otherwise idle.
OPTIONS
The options recognized by this program are:
-g Render in graphics mode instead of text mode, which is the
default.
-m Use the manual paper feed instead of the default automatic.
-s papersize
Specify the paper size. Possible values are: a4,a5,a6,b5,let‐
ter,legal The default value is the European a4.
-o /dev/foo
Specify and alternative printer device file name or any file if
you wish to cat the data to the printer after fully finished
rendering. The default value is: /dev/lp0.
-d darkness
Specify the darkness value in the range from -2 to 2, from dark
to light. 0 (medium) is the default value.
-w weight
Specify the paper weight in the range from -2 to 2, from heavy
to light. 0 (heavy) is the default value.
-v Prints the version information and exit.
-V Run in verbose mode diving information about running status and
currently processed pages in a format similar to the one used by
the TeX tools.
REQUIREMENTS
You will need the excellent GhostScript interpreter for the PostScript
language to use this program.
BUGS
There are currently no known bugs in the driver program itself, other
then of linguistic nature in comments and documentation. The only
bogusity accounts go to OKIDATA - which didn't give me any documenta‐
tion about the protocols used by those printers in first place!
However please note that this is no longer true at all! They even
prvided me for free with a recent model from them!
So all Linux/UNIX enthusiasts out there please note: OKIDATA is making
fine printers for desktop usage, where it's really fine to use the
power of the host CPU for the rendering of the data. They have IMHO
the best price to performace ratio out there one can imagine!
With the latest 2.0.3x series of kernels there appear to be some bogus
workarounds for bugs in the interface protocol handling, which are pre‐
venting this driver from working properly. Recent 2.2 (namely 2.2.9 and
later) work fine again. I have only tested this driver release upon
2.2.9 as of now. If the situtation remains that the Linux printer
driver once works and once fails again version by version, I will start
to include a propper working driver in the package too.
AUTHOR
Marcin Dalecki <dalecki@cs.net.pl> (- constant contact).
25 May 1999 OKI4DRV(l)
