Line by Line Printing in Java

Question

I want to print a page line by line on Dotmatrix Printer (Epson LQ-300 Printer).Which means, I will send a line of some text to printer and after a break I will send another, now both the lines should be on one page not on two pages.

Please show me how I can achieve this.

Regards.

Answer 1

You will probably need a communications library first - parallel or serial ports. There is a rather old Sun implementation from Java 1.2 days, but we still use it successfully with Java 5. The interfaces are defined in the javax.comm package. Use that as a starting point.

As you do not provide more information on your situation, the following is somewhat vague but hopefully helpful anyway:

Com/Serial and parallel ports are depending on the platform, requiring a piece of native code. For Linux there is the RxTx project providing an implementation.

Then you will just write data to the port, once you opened it with the appropriate parameters (there is a port enumerator) according to the protocol the printer understands. For most Epson printers this is the ESC/P(2) standard. Printing multiple lines of plain text should be as easy as printing them to the screen once the set up is complete.

Answer 2

To be honest, I've never tried sending a printer myself, but I did some googling (did you?) and this tutorial looks promising.

Now, regarding the latter request, you simply want to construct a text buffer that you send your text into, and which can dump its contents to the printer at a later point. Please correct me if I oversimplified your problem =)