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I have an EPSON FX printer, I generate PDF reports, 500-600 pages, when I send to print is too slow, because is printed as image.

Searching in web I foud many options:
-PostScript
-PCL
-ESC/P

Reports only have letters and spaces, What would be the fast way to print into a dot matrix printer?

I can't buy another printer. It has to be dot matrix printer.
Working on Windows 10.

Thank you.

Vrian7
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  • What is the printer exact model? Which Windows version? See if the printer has a Draft mode. See also if there is a way to disable bi-directional printing. – harrymc Jul 12 '19 at 16:47
  • I'm not an expert on printers or os, sorry. Is there a specific solutions for each printer? or windows version? I would appreciate if you explain me how. – Vrian7 Jul 12 '19 at 19:14
  • The difference is in the driver and which are the settings that you can change, with different drivers for each combination of OS and printer. The options you should search are Draft mode and bi-directional printing. There is a chance that if I knew the OS+printer I could find out if these options are available. – harrymc Jul 12 '19 at 19:36
  • Thank you so much. Working on windows 10, target printers are dot matrix of different FX models(for example mine is FX890). – Vrian7 Jul 12 '19 at 19:54
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    Why are you creating PDFs? Going back 20 years, The fastest (by far) way to print to a dot matrix printer is to send plain text to it and use its inbuilt character set. – davidgo Jul 12 '19 at 20:39
  • To add to davidgo's comment, if you need the PDFs for some other purpose, don't use them to print. Go back to the source document and print it. If the PDF is now your only source, look at the various solutions for extracting the text or using OCR if it has been stored as an image. Then print the text. – fixer1234 Jul 13 '19 at 05:05

1 Answers1

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The Epson FX-890 is an old printer and uses in Windows 10 the inbuilt generic driver supplied by Windows.

Once installed by simply turning it on for Windows to discover, you will find an entry for the FX-890 printer in the Start menu, under Devices and Printers.

Double-click on the printer, which will open a screen, where you can click on the link saying "Display Printer Properties".

This will open the driver settings dialog, but I have no way of guessing what it will look like. If you see several tabs, check all of them for the following two options: "Draft mode" and "Bi-directional printing". Try to set the printer in Draft mode and to disable Bi-directional printing, whichever of the two options that you can manage to find.

If you have found both options but the printer does not work when both are set, try setting only one of them.

As for your question about printing modes, if you are able to modify this mode:

  • Do not use PCL
  • Try the Epson ESC/P, developed by Epson mainly for use in dot matrix printers (which is your case). Only if this does not work:
  • PostScript (although this might not apply to such an old printer).
harrymc
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