rpi3 text printing slow. Spooling issue?

[Alon76]

The project is great and after working with the driver in cups for some time I was able to get it working and it prints well. I'm printing text only, for now and perhaps barcodes and logo later, but it seems like the text printing is slow. I send a print and I can see the cups print monitor in the Taskbar, wait a bit and it prints.
Any idea how to speed this up? It's connected /dev/ttyACM0
Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

[plinth666]

It buffers an entire page at a time. This is very slowly on usb. I tried using band buffering and it starts printing sooner, but the results have stitching errors which were noticeable and unacceptable.If I remember correctly, the code to send bands is still there and it's straight forward to turn it back on.Glad it's working for you.On Aug 11, 2017 10:06 AM, Alon76 <notifications@github.com> wrote:The project is great and after working with the driver in cups for some time I was able to get it working and it prints well. I'm printing text only, for now and perhaps barcodes and logo later, but it seems like the text printing is slow. I send a print and I can see the cups print monitor in the Taskbar, wait a bit and it prints. Any idea how to speed this up? It's connected /dev/ttyACM0 Any help would be appreciated, thanks! —You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[Alon76]

I guess to have reliable and acceptable prints I need to just deal with it being slow? Do you know if there is a way to do direct printing, no spooler?
The printer has a serial port, would it be better to use that?

[plinth666]

Probably just as slow.You can try bands if you want. You might be ok with it. I didn't like it.On Aug 11, 2017 7:23 PM, Alon76 <notifications@github.com> wrote:I guess to have reliable and acceptable prints I need to just deal with it being slow? Do you know if there is a way to do direct printing, no spooler? The printer has a serial port, would it be better to use that? —You are receiving this because you commented.Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[Alon76]

Can you point me to a tutorial on settings bands? Thanks for the quick replies and the project, total lifesaver.

[plinth666]

To be clear:Cups pages get printed as bitmaps.To do this, you tell the printer how much data is going into a bitmap then send the bitmap, then tell the printer to print it.The time delay is all in downloading one huge bitmap. There is no way to speed that up.Printing in bands looks faster but is actually slower. The same amount of data gets sent but with more overhead.You can print raw text directly to this printer too.Open the port it's connected to and print text to it.There are reference sheets kicking around that have all the special codes to send it to make text bold, print barcodes, and so on.This is a commercial printer like you'd see at a point of sale, so it has the ability to permanently download images, like a store logo. So printing a receipt is a short sequence for the logo, then raw text for the actual receipt, then a sequence to cut the paper.Used in that mode, it's very fast.On Aug 11, 2017 7:48 PM, Steve Hawley <hawley@plinth.org> wrote:Probably just as slow.You can try bands if you want. You might be ok with it. I didn't like it.On Aug 11, 2017 7:23 PM, Alon76 <notifications@github.com> wrote:I guess to have reliable and acceptable prints I need to just deal with it being slow? Do you know if there is a way to do direct printing, no spooler? The printer has a serial port, would it be better to use that? —You are receiving this because you commented.Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[Alon76]

Are you referring to esc/pos? I've tried to get that working, but can't see to figure out how. Or are you talking about something else?

[Alon76]

Last question. There is a big gap, bunch of empty lines where the items ordered are listed. Is that the pos software or the driver?

[groolot]

See also #11