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Printer-EVOLIS-0.01
River stage zero No dependents
/ Printer::EVOLIS

NAME

Printer::EVOLIS - pixel-exact driver for EVOLIS Dualys two-side card printer in perl

DESCRIPTION

This is experimental support for EVOLIS Dualys 3 printer with black ribbon (K) to provide pixel-exact driver with support for two-side printing.

Existing cups driver is available at

http://www.evolis.com/eng/Drivers-Support/Product-support/Dualys-3

but I haven't been able to make it print on both sides of cards, partly because using dumplex option in cups seems to segfault GhostScript and/or rastertoevolis cups filter depending on combination of duplex options.

I also needed pixel perfect transfer to printer, and cups bitmap format is always in color, leaving final pixel modifications down to cups filter which always produced differences between file sent to printer and perfect black and white rendition of it.

SCRIPTS

Current toolset consists of following scripts:

scripts/inkscape-render.pl card/template.svg 201008159999 login Name Surname

Generate pdf files from Inkscape SVG template in card/ using print-front and print-back object IDs. Layers doesn't work since we can't toggle visilbity easily. To print more than one object gruop them and change ID of group.

After pdf files are created, GhostScript is used to rasterize them into pbm (monochrome) bitmaps.

scripts/evolis-driver.pl front.pbm back.pbm > evolis.commands

Provides driver which generates printer command stream to print two-sided card from pbm files.

scripts/evolis-simulator.pl evolis

Simulator for EVOLIS printer commands which is useful for development. It creates one pbm file per page printed.

scripts/evolis-command.pl

Command-line interface to send commands to printer and receive responses. Supports readline for editing and history. Requires local parallel port connection, probably to USB parallel device.

EXAMPLE

Following is simple walk-through from svg image in Inkscape to evolis command stream which can be executed in top-level directory of this distribution:

./scripts/inkscape-render.pl card/ffzg-2010.svg 201008159999 Ime Prezime
./scripts/evolis-driver.pl out/201008159999.front.pbm out/201008159999.back.pbm > evolis
./scripts/evolis-simulator.pl evolis
qiv evolis*.pbm