We are doing printing from a firefox pop-up window to a 9-pin dot matrix printer, to make printing inexpensive for our application (Epson Lx 300+, Lx 300+ II family). As of now, I used IBM Pro printer II and PPD for Epson dot matrix printers as driver since my printer is not supported out of the box. In both cases, I am unable to do a fast printing using the default fonts in the printer. The printer gets text in bit-map/graphics so the print is time consuming.
So I would like to know how I can have the default printing font changed to use the built-in fonts in printer which will print super fast? Where I can do this change - Firefox or CUPS so that the data sent will be in a font either matching with printer default or just raw data so that printer default font used? I already played around with printer setup and it does not look like I have an option there and the font I chose there get overridden by font sent by application.
I believe cups has some setup on choosing this. A command line printout (from terminal doing a lp testfile is also using some font other than default built-in Draft/Roman/San Serif of the printer. Any pointer to right direction is appreciated. A similar question on Stackoverflow: How can I send raw data to a printer in Mozilla Firefox? (Raw Print) did not help me.
Update: With setting up the printer as a raw printer, I could get very fast printing from a terminal (lp mytextfile). With this setting, the OS (Ubuntu 10.10) sent raw text data and printer used its font (built-in one in ROM) to print it. But a print from firefox did not print what I expected, since it needs a post script printer, not a raw printer. What I am looking is print speed similar to raw print.
I don't think the browser's built-in print command is going to help much. The browser always prints in a graphical manner. You need something like jzebra to send raw data directly to the printer from a webpage.
I can tell you how to do it in firefox:
Under Edit > Preferences > Content you can control the Default Font, and its Size. By Clicking on the 'Advanced' button you can un-tick 'allow pages to choose their own fonts' which will force rendering with the font of your choice.
I find with monospace documents, however, simply changing the font in the 'monospace' drop-down list on this dialoug will suffice, as not too many web-designers bother to specify one, so firefox just falls back to the default in anycase.