naquaada Posted October 26, 2016 Share Posted October 26, 2016 Hello, I got an Epson LQ-590 impact printer for a few bucks. This sounds rather old-aged, but it is a modern printer with USB and Parallel port which is listed on the Epson website. Impact printers are still designed for endless paper with a tractor, for printing labels, multiple copies at once and more. They're also used on airports for freight papers and construction sites, because they are very robust. This and the cost are the best things: A print head of an OKI printer has a maximum of 200 million uses, and one page has a cost of 0,05 - 0,08 cent. They are also not slower as an inkjet printer, only louder. So, that's a small introduction. The Epson LQ-590 is fine working via the default Epson 24-pin driver in OS X, the print quality is good, even if 360x180 dpi sounds weird today. But there's one problem: There's no way to get an real ESC/P2 driver which works like in DOS, which uses the basic functions of the printer, the inbuilt fonts, styles like bold, italic and underlined and the character width. I've tested Gutenprint, Ghostscript and Foomatic. The last ones provide a driver, but it's also just matrix and in a very bad quality. Is there anything for this to use on a Mac? I'm not the only one who is searching a driver like this. Maybe there's something in Linux what could be converted to the Mac? It would be great, because for writing a business letter you don't need much different fonts or else, and the inbuilt fonts of a matrix printer have a better quality than graphics data sent to it. Greets, naquaada. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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