1OKI4DRV(l) OKI4DRV(l)
2
6 oki4drv - User space based driver for OKIPAGE 4w, OKI400w, OKIPAGE 4w
7 PLUS and OKIPAGE 8w Lite printers.
8
10 oki4drv [-gmvV] [-s papersize] [-o output] [-d darkness] [-w paper‐
11 weight] [[file]...]
12
14 oki4drv is a user level driver for the OKIPAGE 4w , OKIPAGE 4w PLUS ,
15 as well as the OKIPAGE 8w Lite GDI (Generic Display Interface) print‐
16 ers.
17 It takes PostScript input from some files specified on the command line
19 or from standard input and renders them through GhostScript's raw bit
20 device. The GhostScript output will be coded into a data stream appro‐
21 priate for those printers and spooled page by page sendid directly to
22 the printer device itself. The default printer device file used is:
23 /dev/lp0.
24 WARNING!
26 Due to the printing technology involved the feeding of the printer with
28 data imposes some real-time constraints on the run of this program. The
29 document processing must therefore be done on a page by page basis. The
30 host system should be fairly well equipped to keep up with the printers
31 hunger for data. Supposedly an 486 with about 16M bytes of RAM should
32 do it. But please don't try to use this program with one of those
33 printers on an in esp. 386SX/16MHz with 4 megs of RAM! I'm personally
34 using an K6/333MHz with 64M bytes of RAM and can't therefore tell what
35 the real lower limit is.
36 However: be warned! Failing to meet those constraints may result in
38 severe physical damage to the printer! Thought it shouldn't, since I
39 have been observing those printers ability to stop and resume in the
40 middle of processing a sheet of paper. It appears that this behavior
41 involves some control from the computers side, so I can't really at
42 this stage of developement reproduce it.
43 Please make sure that the printer is set to EPP or SPP mode in the
45 BIOS! ECP will fail for reasons I don't want to explain in length
46 here.
47 To guarantee a quite continuous data stream, the process of sending the
49 page image data to the printer is exploring real time and execution
50 priority manipulation facilities of the underlying operating system. As
51 a consequence this program must be used in SUID root mode. The second
52 consequence of this is that it doesn't make sense to use this program
53 in pure filtering mode under the control of some systems printer spool‐
54 ing daemon like for example: lpd. Instead you can use the "oki4daemon"
55 to connect from your spooler over a named pipe into the soft realtime
56 driver process. See README.oki4daemon in the distribution.
57 If you expirence problems try first to output the data into a separate
59 file and thereafter to cat it to the printer at once like this:
60 oki4drv foo.ps -o temp; cat temp > /dev/lp0.
62 And make sure that the machine you are using is otherwise idle.
64
66 The options recognized by this program are:
67 -g Render in graphics mode instead of text mode, which is the
69 default.
70 -m Use the manual paper feed instead of the default automatic.
72 -s papersize
74 Specify the paper size. Possible values are: a4,a5,a6,b5,let‐
75 ter,legal The default value is the European a4.
76 -o /dev/foo
78 Specify and alternative printer device file name or any file if
79 you wish to cat the data to the printer after fully finished
80 rendering. The default value is: /dev/lp0.
81 -d darkness
83 Specify the darkness value in the range from -2 to 2, from dark
84 to light. 0 (medium) is the default value.
85 -w weight
87 Specify the paper weight in the range from -2 to 2, from heavy
88 to light. 0 (heavy) is the default value.
89 -v Prints the version information and exit.
91 -V Run in verbose mode diving information about running status and
93 currently processed pages in a format similar to the one used by
94 the TeX tools.
95
97 You will need the excellent GhostScript interpreter for the PostScript
98 language to use this program.
99
101 There are currently no known bugs in the driver program itself, other
102 then of linguistic nature in comments and documentation. The only
103 bogusity accounts go to OKIDATA - which didn't give me any documenta‐
104 tion about the protocols used by those printers in first place!
105 However please note that this is no longer true at all! They even
107 prvided me for free with a recent model from them!
108 So all Linux/UNIX enthusiasts out there please note: OKIDATA is making
110 fine printers for desktop usage, where it's really fine to use the
111 power of the host CPU for the rendering of the data. They have IMHO
112 the best price to performace ratio out there one can imagine!
113 With the latest 2.0.3x series of kernels there appear to be some bogus
115 workarounds for bugs in the interface protocol handling, which are pre‐
116 venting this driver from working properly. Recent 2.2 (namely 2.2.9 and
117 later) work fine again. I have only tested this driver release upon
118 2.2.9 as of now. If the situtation remains that the Linux printer
119 driver once works and once fails again version by version, I will start
120 to include a propper working driver in the package too.
121
123 Marcin Dalecki <dalecki@cs.net.pl> (- constant contact).
124 25 May 1999 OKI4DRV(l)