Epson printers and the TAB character

[David MILLARD]

We are attempting to set a form-length of 9 lines on an Epson DFX-5000 printer attached to a serial port. The control string for this is Esc C (the TAB character has the ASCII value 9). The TAB character is being changed to 8 spaces and the space character has ASCII value 32 so we are getting a 32 line page length instead of 9. How can we stop the TAB character being changed to spaces (remembering that we do not have a getty running on the port because it is a printer) ?

[Andreas Voss]

Hi,

if you are using you printer with lp you could edit the interface file:

/etc/lp/interface/

search for the stty command and add the option

-tabs

to the stty line. This should prevent expanding tabs to spaces.
See also 'man stty'

Regards

[David MILLARD]

Thanks for the response.

Unfortunately, we are not able to use the lp spooler, the serial ports are addressed directly by our application.