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We are doing printing from a firefox pop-up window to a 9-pin dot matrix printer, to make printing inexpensive for our application (Epson Lx 300+, Lx 300+ II family). As of now, I used IBM Pro printer II and PPD for Epson dot matrix printers as driver since my printer is not supported out of the box. In both cases, I am unable to do a fast printing using the default fonts in the printer. The printer gets text in bit-map/graphics so the print is time consuming.

So I would like to know how I can have the default printing font changed to use the built-in fonts in printer which will print super fast? Where I can do this change - Firefox or CUPS so that the data sent will be in a font either matching with printer default or just raw data so that printer default font used? I already played around with printer setup and it does not look like I have an option there and the font I chose there get overridden by font sent by application.

I believe cups has some setup on choosing this. A command line printout (from terminal doing a lp testfile is also using some font other than default built-in Draft/Roman/San Serif of the printer. Any pointer to right direction is appreciated. A similar question on Stackoverflow: How can I send raw data to a printer in Mozilla Firefox? (Raw Print) did not help me.

Update: With setting up the printer as a raw printer, I could get very fast printing from a terminal (lp mytextfile). With this setting, the OS (Ubuntu 10.10) sent raw text data and printer used its font (built-in one in ROM) to print it. But a print from firefox did not print what I expected, since it needs a post script printer, not a raw printer. What I am looking is print speed similar to raw print.

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2 Answers 2

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I don't think the browser's built-in print command is going to help much. The browser always prints in a graphical manner. You need something like jzebra to send raw data directly to the printer from a webpage.

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  • We used jzebra to send the raw data and got it working after some re-programming. Thanks for the solution
    – Jamess
    Sep 22, 2011 at 10:26
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I can tell you how to do it in firefox:

Under Edit > Preferences > Content you can control the Default Font, and its Size. By Clicking on the 'Advanced' button you can un-tick 'allow pages to choose their own fonts' which will force rendering with the font of your choice.

I find with monospace documents, however, simply changing the font in the 'monospace' drop-down list on this dialoug will suffice, as not too many web-designers bother to specify one, so firefox just falls back to the default in anycase.

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  • Unfortunately this changes all of the webpages to change font to Monospace. I do not want that to happen, but wants only the font to be different when printing. (or if that looks difficult, I would like to see only the pop up window which has whatever I like to print to have monospace font). Is there a way for that ?
    – Jamess
    Jun 2, 2011 at 15:57
  • if you only want it in specific situations; setup the default fonts as i stated, but instead don't un-tick 'allow pages to choose...'. On any specific page you want to remove the formatting from select "view > page style > no style"
    – thomasmichaelwallace
    Jun 2, 2011 at 16:37
  • a more universal answer would be to make a personal printing style-sheet (wizcrafts.net/blogs/2007/01/…) unfortunately at the moment I only have enough time to point you on your way with this though.
    – thomasmichaelwallace
    Jun 2, 2011 at 16:47
  • Sorry, this did not help. The browser still sents bitmap and the dot printer carefully prints it out by taking time. What I would need is browser sending data (probably raw), so that printer can use its default built in fonts (say Draft, Sans Serif etc) which will print very fast. Some discussion on this is here 'stackoverflow.com/questions/1096703/…' , but didn't help me much.
    – Jamess
    Jun 3, 2011 at 6:26

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