On 22 April 2014 21:00, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
On my browser, I go to google and type "Parallel printer to" and many suggestions come up, such as to: USB, Serial, Network, WIFI etc. I'm sure you can get a parallel to Serial adaptor, and then capture the serial data directly,
I get the same results when I try but all the ones I see are for connecting a parallel printer to a PC that doesn't have a parallel port, rather than for replacing the printer on a PC (or in this case a non-PC) which does. It's a common problem with search engines when the keywords you need to search for have a much more common meaning which is the reverse of what you need.
However.... what will you do with it then? You'll have a stream of ascii and printer control codes to decipher. Perhaps doable if it's Epson control codes, but probably quite hard if it's HP's PCL, or similar.
Until I see the data I don't know, but the printer itself is a simple dot matrix line printer so I'm hoping it won't be anything too complicated. (What I'm hoping to extract is the raw data rather than images of it as it would be printed.) As the device connected to the printer isn't a PC I'm hoping it's pretty basic in its outut.
http://www.pclviewer.com/resources/capture/index.html which sounds like it will do what you want and it's probably a lot simpler to get something off the shelf (assuming it's still available) from someone who can support it and specialises in it.
That does look close, I'll take a look in more detail at that. It looks like it'll capture an image of what would be printed rather than let me extract the data but it might be good enough and a lot simpler than rolling my own.
Alternatively try googling "Parallel Printer data capture" or "Parallel Printer Capture"
I tried similar searches before but found software for capturing the data going out of the printer port, which would be fine if the printer was attached to a PC, but it's not :-(