Running dmesg after plugging my POS-5890K labelled usb thermal receipt printer, it identifies itself as full-speed USB device number 9 using ehci-pci idVendor=0416, idProduct=5011 Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 Product: POS58 USB Printer Manufacturer: GD32 Microelectronics SerialNumber: Printer I found the hard way that these printers are not supported by CUPS by default ... one has to go the extra length to either send esc/p codes manually via your own app http://kg4zqz.blogspot.com/2016/08/escposf-thermal-printer-filter-and.html ...or compile a driver from source, just like 20 years ago for some printers... maybe 2018 will be the year of desktop linux *sarcasm* I've tried this driver and it didn't work... http://scruss.com/blog/2015/07/12/thermal-printer-driver-for-cups-linux-and-raspberry-pi-zj-58/ (the driver source was fetched by git from its current github repo, so it's not out of date, it's in fact newer than the above blog post) What gives more clues is the small piece of thermal paper that came with the printer with a printout of its self-test (surely from Windows). It reads: 58-IV-U Thermal Printer Version: 58.E-Z04-AA Revised date: 06-Jan-2017 Command Standard: EPSON (ESC/POS) Print mode: Normal mode & Hex Mode Print method: Line Thermal Print width: 384 dots/line Print speed: 90 mm/s Chinese Mode: NO Print density: Level3 Current Codepage:0 Interface Type: USB Current Character: Chinese (GB18030) Alphanumeric Code Page: 0: OEM437 (Std.Europe) 1: Katakana 2:OEM850 (Multilingual) (…) 96:(Thai2) I wonder why the CUPS folks have not released a generic “EPSON ESC/POS” printer driver where the above parameters can be tweaked and entered manually. The driver mentioned above was compiled, and installed but didn’t work. A sample print gave gibberish. A second text-only printing (by clicking the CUPS “print self-test page” read “IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU’RE USING THE WRONG DRIVER FOR YOUR PRINTER”. A crude bug-finding code it seems… Any ideas before I head over to the CUPS maling list and pull my hair? For instance, this blog post https://mike42.me/blog/2015-03-getting-a-usb-receipt-printer-working-on-linux talks about using "usblp" but commenters say "usblp" was deprecated (already in 2015) So what does replace usblp? And look, here someone else also pulling his hair. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45926734/raw-cups-printer-how-to-avoid-filters-and-drops-by-usblp FFS, a line printer was the first type of printer, back in the days of RS232 ports. If we can't get a USB line printer detected and configured and send ASCII to it, we're doomed. All because there's a dozen poorly documented layers of software crap obscuring it... FC _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
