Loading ...

 
NEC PinWriter P6 plus
 
Color dot matrix printer, max. 360x360 dpi, works Perfectly
Recommended Driver: necp6 (Home page, View PPD, directly download PPD)
Generic Instructions: CUPS, no spooler
 

Miscellaneous

Printer supports direct text printing with the 'us-ascii' charset.

Comments

Color is an optional feature for this printer.

Some info contributed by Sebastian Leske (Sebastian dot Leske at bigfoot dot de):

The information about the NEC P6+ in the database is basically correct. I own one and I can confirm that it works fine with Ghostscript's necp6 driver.

There are three things I'd like to add, though:

1) The necp6 driver does not seem to support colour printing (at least I could not figure out how).

As noted in the database, color is only available via an accessory that must be bought separately. If you have it and want to print in color, you can use one of the Epson drivers in Ghostscript (don't remember which, but I tried it, think it was 'epsonc'). The NEC P6+ can emulate Epson color printers, so this works.

The quality is not quite as good as with a native color driver under Win95, but for colored text / linedrawings it's ok. You would not want to print photos with the NEC P6+ anyway, the results are very weak compared to modern injet printers.

2) The printer cannot print on the top 20 mm or so of the page. Ghostscript does not seem to know about this, so everything you print will be shifted downward on the page by about 20 mm. This should be kept in mind when laying out a page for printing.

Actually, normally the unprintable area at the top is even longer, but you can configure the printer to minimize the unprintable area by not putting down the paper guide wheel until after printing the first line. See handbook for details.

3) Using address labels via the tractor feed works fine under Linux, you just need to send the printer precision line feeds between the text for each label to advance to the next label. The codes are in the handbook, or email me for details. I made a perl script which outputs the appropriate control codes.

Note: Don't print address labels in graphics mode (i.e. via ghostscript), send the printer text, so it uses its internal fonts. Text printed in graphics mode often comes out bad, because the linefeeds with tractor-fed labels are somewhat irregular. In graphics mode, a linefeed may occur in the middle of a line, then the bottom half and the top half of a line of text may be separated or run into each other.

Drivers

The following driver(s) are known to drive this printer:

Recommended driver:

 
necp6  (driver home page)
 
This driver is free software.
Type: Ghostscript built-in
Download:PPD file: View PPD, directly download PPD
 

Other drivers:

 
epsonc  (driver home page)
 
This driver is free software.
Type: Ghostscript built-in
Download:PPD file: View PPD, directly download PPD