QPCPrint

Latest release: 1.03

In the past printers were intelligent and able to render text on their own. Applications just had to use some relatively simple printer commands that define how the text should look like and the printer did the rest.

Nowadays, while many of those applications still exist, printers that understand those languages are increasingly hard to find. For applications that use the Epson® ESC/P™ or ESC/P2™ language there is now a solution to this problem: QPCPrint.

QPCPrint is an emulator that accepts input in ESC/P2 format, be it text or raster graphics, and outputs the result to any Windows compatible printer. The emulation has a precision of 1440dpi and matches the output of a real printer extremely well.

The QPCPrint engine presents itself in the form of a filter plug-in, i.e. an executable that accepts input as a file and outputs the result on a printer. This mechanism is directly supported by the QPC QL emulator, for example. Using freely available third party tools it can also be turned into the heart of a virtual Windows printer, thus enabling applications that directly put their data into a printer spool or even still use LPT ports to use QPCPrint.

Due to the amount of work that went into it, QPCPrint is a commercial offering, but as a try-before-you-buy deal there is a free demo available which restricts printing to 3 pages and adorns each page with some decoration.