I decided to take a look at the output file align.ibmpro from the example above. The first thing in the file was ^Q (hex 11), which means "Select Printer". OK, that makes sense, I thought. The second thing in the file was ESC 3 0 (hex 1B3330), which means "set the graphics line spacing to 48/216 of an inch". That surprised me somewhat, as I was expecting 24/216 of an inch. (3/216 of an inch, or 1/72 of an inch, is the distance between pins for a standard 9-pin dot matrix printer; so 8*3/216 would be 24/216. That would be expected for 8-pin graphics. But I thought, "OK, maybe I didn't specify the right options and the defaults aren't right for me". I went on.
The third item was the killer. It was ESC * (hex 1B2A), which means "set graphics mode" in the Epson graphics language (ESC/P), but which is invalid for any kind of IBM graphics printer derivative! ESC ? (reassign graphics mode) and ESC ^ (select 9-pin graphics) are invalid also. I don't know if the file contains any of these orders, but I just thought I would mention it for completeness' sake. It looks to me like there has been just a bit too much consolidation; and someone somewhere has lost sight of the subtle differences between IBM graphics language and Epson graphics language, which are almost (but not quite) the same. ESC * is not valid. Period. This is definitely a bug in the ibmpro driver of ghostscript! There may be other bugs too, but I got far enough to be certain that the driver is buggy. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
