[Simh] KS10 IMP documentation

[Timothe Litt]

On 29-Feb-16 13:05, Paul Koning wrote:
>> On Feb 29, 2016, at 12:59 PM, Timothe Litt <litt at ieee.org> wrote:
>>
>> ...
>> I created a printer class driver layer for simh when I did PDF output for all the emulators, but that went into a black hole of "more is not enough" and did not find its way into simh/master.
> I looked at PostScript output for a printer, which is fairly easy and makes it possible to do non-ASCII characters if the particular machine needs those.  In the end, I did it as an external program (small Python script) instead, but in SimH would certainly not be hard.  PS has the advantage that it's easy to generate and easy to see what's going on, and it can either be printed directly, or converted easily to PDF.
>
> 	
PDF is an ISO archival standard and these days, more accessible than
PS.  To do anything with postscript, you need to get add-on software -
usually ghostscript.  Pretty much every PC, Mac and Linux box has a PDF
reader out of the box.  Several web browsers have built-in PDF
interpreters.  PDF supports non-ASCII characters.  And PDF supports
embedding other media types.  You can (and I did) support compression
and embedded images.

Anyhow, that's what I picked.

I did the work of generating PDF with green (or blue or ..) bar paper,
tractor feed holes, background logos, form sizes, overstrike, queuing to
a spool directory, appending, checkpointing, etc.  I had an escape
sequence interpreter so anything not in the PDF character set (a
superset of ASCII) could be generated fairly easily from a SimH driver. 
I provided translations for 32 character sets, from ASCII to Greek to
Technical.

I integrated it into all the simulators - not just DEC.  It didn't
preclude .txt output.  But it became controversial for reasons not fully
understood - and I was unwilling to keep implementing non-core features
for specific host platforms. 

I had a lot of other pressures on my time.  I gave up.  I still think it
was a nice piece of work, but clearly the community didn't.

Anyhow, the point is that it's feasible to build a class driver layer &
FWIW, my strong opinion is that for LPD bridges and any output formats,
that's the way to go.  Of course, given my experience, you might want to
collect other opinions.



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 4994 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
URL: <http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/pipermail/simh/attachments/20160229/bdfc9378/attachment.bin>