Sending characters to the printer

Question

Hello together,
we are trying to send raw data or control characters to a printer using the standard "Universal / TextOnly" printer driver in order to print barcode data on a special printer. This works fine by using Windows Notepad.
Unfortunately, Java only provides printing with a Graphics context. So we have not succeeded so far.
Has anyone else had the same problem and how did they overcome it?

Answer 1

Hi again.
This is distilled from the JavaCOMM API.
This code is changed from the example and looking at the docs for a minute. I don't know if it compiles but it should :-)
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import javax.comm.*;
public class SimpleWrite {
    static Enumeration portList;
    static CommPortIdentifier portId;
    static String messageString = "Hello, world!\n";
    static ParallelPort parallelPort;
    static OutputStream outputStream;
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        portList = CommPortIdentifier.getPortIdentifiers();
        while (portList.hasMoreElements()) {
            portId = (CommPortIdentifier) portList.nextElement();
            if (portId.getPortType() == CommPortIdentifier.PORT_PARALLEL) {
                // if (portId.getName().equals("LPT1")) {
                if (portId.getName().equals("/dev/lp0")) {
                    try {
                        parallelPort= ParallelPort
                            portId.open("SimpleWriteApp", 2000);
                    } catch (PortInUseException e) {}
                    try {
                        outputStream = parallelPort.getOutputStream();
                    } catch (IOException e) {}
                    try {
                        outputStream.write(messageString.getBytes());
                    } catch (IOException e) {}
}Hope this helps,
Nuno