Introduction

We have an Index everest braille printer, currently housed in the library, but the Windows machine that it is connected to doesn't seem to want to print. It has always been tempramental at best of times, even more so since it was upgraded to windows 7.

Index Braille only seem to have printer drivers for windows and mac on their website.

When connecting printer directly to linux using usb, Ubuntu searches for drivers then fails to find anything. What is one to do.

Instructions

Found that the everest has ethernet, so investigated.

• Obtain router.
• Connect laptop and printer to router.
• Help+Help on printer will print out its ip address, or nmap.
• nmap found the following open ports: 23, 80, 515 9100.
• 23: telnet but connection keeps being reset.
• 80: for upgrading firmware
• 515: dont know.
• 9100: any traffic on this port is printed (Huray).
• Make sure the right braille table is selected on the printer.
• use netcat to print: nc PRINTER_IP 9100 < printFile.txt

No drivers needed no nothing, You got to love the simlicity of things that just work.

Transparent mode

The printer is also able to go into transparent mode, to prepare files by hand:

• Download/compile Braille Translator Thanks Owen.
• Create your ascii to braille dots (see swedish.tbl).
• Use fold or fmt to wrap text.
• ./translate TBLNAME.tbl <input.txt >out.brl
• use netcat to send out.brl to printer as above.

Embosser settings

• Braille dot distance 2.5
• Line distance 5.25
• Inner margin 2, outer/top/bottom 1.

This gives 30 chars/line, 20 lines on an a4 page.

Investigate

Preprocess printFile using liblouis tools.