Re: Aspect 3000 --> HPGL/2 device

Steve Philson (philson@nmr.chem.umn.edu)
Fri, 17 Jan 1997 11:24:30 -0600 (CST)

On Fri, 17 Jan 1997 numare@cnj.digex.net wrote:

> Have Aspect 3000 sending output to HP-7550 Plus plotter via RS-232-C
> interface. Works fine.
> Have Samsung Finale 8000 laser printer with PCL5 emulation. PCL5
> includes HPGL/2 emulation. Can not get Aspect 3000 to send output to
> Samsung Finale 8000 using RS-232-C interface with baud rate = 9600,
> parity = none, data bit = 8, stop bit = 1, and xon = on. Can anyone
> tell me how to make it work?

The problem with laser printer emulation of HP plotters is that the Aspect
is expecting certain responses from the plotter that the printer does not
send. I guess newer versions of the software can deal with it; I dealt
with it some years ago by connecting the Aspect serial output to another
computer and translating things, then sending plot to a networked printer.
I used a Sun workstation when I had several ACs, now I have one more
isolated and use a pc running FreeBSD (Linux works too; couldn't do it
with MS-DOS, though). I did something similar to translate plotter output
from a Bruker EPR so that I could use a printer. The scripts are just
perl scripts, about a page long, so I could send them if anyone is
interested.

I used a neat PC software package (plus a couple cables) called Serialtest
to eavesdrop over the working serial connections between spectrometers and
plotter, to figure out what the spectrometer wanted to see. Even the
ancient version of it I have still comes in handy.

--
Steve Philson           philson@nmr.chem.umn.edu
Director NMR Lab        612-626-0297
Chemistry Dept.         University of Minnesota