Long, long time ago, before prices of inkjet and laser printers fell to levels allowing home users to own and use them, there was a primitive printing technology called dot-matrix. As any technology of the past, it is not competitive anymore. However it still has few advantages and one of them is reliability of these devices. Some time ago I found quite a cheap Oki 3321 printer that has 9 pin head and is capable of printing on A3 paper in portrait orientation. Usual mode of printing for these devices was simple text mode, where you just were writing your text in ASCII (or any weird coding popular in your country of origin) to its parallel port. Fortunately these printers usually had also graphic mode, where you could fully use capabilities of the device.
I already was experimenting some time with my device, so I already know it uses Mazovia variant (with zł as single glyph) as its codepage. I was also able to guess how to switch into graphic mode, so in theory I was able to print images for some time. Unfortunately any CUPS drivers I used did not provide acceptable results, so all I could do was to write some support tool myself. Continue reading “Printing pictures like its 1873 using Oki 3321 dot-matrix printer”