Help ID this weird screenshot format..ASCII art thing..

[ChristofferB]

Hi all!

I'm a little stumped by the output of this DOS program. Any insight is appreciated.

I'm running a DOS PC with a multi-channel analyzer card in it to record gamma spectra. No software documentation.

Either way, one of the save options is to print screen, and it tells you to enter path "[PRN]" - I assume it wants LPT1 or something. Don't have an LPT printer.

When I just type a file name, it creates a file with something that looks vaguely like ASCII art of my spectrum, + a lot of gibberish.

Does this make sense to anyone, and is there a way of converting it to an image?

Thanks in advance!

[dorkshoei]

Wrong forum!

[xtech]

For me this data looks like ordinary printer escape codes. I see there even command to switch printer to single density graphics. See escape codes list: http://www.lprng.com/RESOURCES/EPSON/epson.htm
I don't know if there are printer emulators/converters to bitmap.

[nali]

+1 Looks like Epson ESC/P commands, or maybe IBM's version. Dot Matrix anyway.

[ozcar]

For me this data looks like ordinary printer escape codes.

Certainly contains many "escape sequences" (starting with hex 1B). Perhaps there was a way to tell the program to produce output for different printer types.

Starts out like this (in hexadecimal bytes):

Code: [Select]

1B 33 18 12 1B 50 1B 57 00 0D 0A 0A 0A 20 20 20

[nali]

Starts out like this (in hexadecimal bytes):

Code: [Select]

1B 33 18 12 1B 50 1B 57 00 0D 0A 0A 0A 20 20 20

1B 33 18 - Set line spacing
12 - Empty line buffer
1B 50  - Select 10cpi font
1B 57 00 - Turn off double-width

Source https://files.support.epson.com/pdf/general/escp2ref.pdf

This might help https://github.com/RWAP/PrinterToPDF/ (no experience of it myself, just found it on the web)

[ChristofferB]

Wow that was quick! Thanks!

I just tried this very sketchy printfile to PDF converter, but no luck:

Code: [Select]

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/printfileprinter.html
I'll look into changing the print format