Once I got it home, though, I could see it needed some work. The platen was covered in ink and correction fluid splatters. Worse, the carriage would jam<\/a> in random places. It was full of dust and paperclips. But the printwheel did make crisp marks on paper<\/a>, so it was worth looking at a repair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanks to Phoenix Typewriter’s<\/a> repair video \u201cIBM Wheelwriter Typewriter Repair Fix Carriage Carrier Sticks Margins Reset Makes Noise<\/a>\u201d, I got it going again. I’m not sure how much life I’ve got left in the film ribbon, but for now it’s doing great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Note that there are lots of electronics projects \u2014 such as tofergregg\/IBM-Wheelwriter-Hack: Turning an IBM Wheelwriter into a unique printer<\/a> \u2014 that use an Arduino or similar to drive the printer. This is not that (or those). Here I’m using the Printer Option board plus a USB to Parallel cable. There’s almost nothing out there about how these work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You’ll need a USB to Parallel adapter, something like this: StarTech 10 ft USB to Parallel Printer Adapter – M\/M<\/a>. You need the kind with the big Centronics connector, not the 25-pin D-type. My one (old) has a chunky plastic case that won’t fit into the port on the Wheelwriter unless you remove part of the cable housing. On my Linux box, the port device is \/dev\/usb\/lp0<\/strong>. You might want to add yourself to the lp<\/em> group so you can send data to the printer without using sudo:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Wheelwriter needs to be switched into printer mode manually by pressing the Code<\/kbd> + Printer Enable<\/kbd> keys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As far as I can tell, the Wheelwriter understands a subset of IBM ProPrinter<\/a> codes. Like most simple printers, most control codes start with an Esc<\/em> character (ASCII 27). Lines need to end with both a Carriage Return (ASCII 13) and newline (ASCII 10). Sending only CRs allows overprinting, while sending only newlines gives stair-step output.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The codes I’ve found to work so far are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Text functions such as italics and extended text aren’t possible with a daisywheel printer. You can attempt dot-matrix graphics using full stops and micro spacing, but I don’t want to know you if you’d try.<\/p>\n\n\n\n echo<\/em> is about the simplest way of doing it. Some systems provide an echo built-in that doesn’t support the -e<\/em> (interpret special characters) and -n<\/em> (don’t send newline) options. You may have to call \/usr\/bin\/echo<\/em> instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To print emphasized:<\/p>\n\n\n\n which prints<\/p>\n\n\n\n To print underlined:<\/p>\n\n\n\n which types<\/p>\n\n\n\n To set the line spacing to a (very cramped) 1\/12″ [= 2.1 mm] and print a horizontal line of dots and a vertical line of dots, both equally spaced (if you’re using Prestige Elite):<\/p>\n\n\n\n IBM daisywheels typically can’t represent the whole ASCII character set. Here’s what an attempt to print codes 33 to 126 in Prestige Elite looks like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The following characters are missing:<\/p>\n\n\n\n So printing your HTML or Python is right out. FORTRAN, as ever, is safe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prestige Elite<\/a> is a 12 character per inch font (\u201c12 pitch\u201d, or even \u201cElite\u201d in typewriter parlance) that’s mostly been overshadowed by Courier (typically 10 characters per inch) in computer usage. This is a shame, as it’s a much prettier font.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s very little out there about printing with IBM daisywheels. This is a dump of the stuff I’ve found that may help other people:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I can’t believe I’m having to write this article again. Back in 2004, I picked up an identical model of typewriter on Freecycle, also complete with the parallel printer option board. The one I had back then had an incredible selection of printwheels. And I gave it all away! Aaargh! Why? Last month, I ventured […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[3318,887,922,1806,3317],"class_list":["post-17204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers-suck","tag-daisywheel","tag-ibm","tag-printer","tag-typewriter","tag-wheelwriter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-4tu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17204"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17209,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17204\/revisions\/17209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Connecting the printer<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
sudo adduser user<\/em> lp<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nPrinter Codes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
(double strike printing [Esc<\/em> G, Esc<\/em> H] might also work, but I haven’t tried them)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
(technically, these are Esc<\/em> – n<\/em>, where n<\/em> = ASCII 1 or 0, not character “1” or “0”. But the characters seem to work, too)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
(this one really matters: if you send “6” (ASCII 66) instead of 6, you’ll get 66\/72 = 11\/12″ [= 28.3 mm] line spacing instead of the 1\/12″ [= 2.1 mm] you expected)<\/li>\n\n\n\nSending codes from the command line<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
echo -en 'well \\eEhello\\eF there!\\r\\n' > \/dev\/usb\/lp0<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nwell hello<\/strong> there!<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\necho -en 'well \\e-1hello\\e-0 there!\\r\\n' > \/dev\/usb\/lp0<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nwell hello<\/span> there!<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\necho -en '\\eA\\x05\\e2\\r\\n..........\\r\\n.\\r\\n.\\r\\n.\\r\\n.\\r\\n.\\r\\n.\\r\\n.\\r\\n.\\r\\n.\\r\\n\\r\\n' > \/dev\/usb\/lp0<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nCharacter set issues<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"tabulation](\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/pww-printer\/DSC_0013.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n< > \\ ^ ` { | } ~<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nRelated, yet misc.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n