Re: lp5250 and "bypass code"

On 10/29/2010 12:01 PM, John Chambers wrote:
> Does anyone here know what a "bypass code" is?  Or how to implement it
> on lp5250d for windows?
>

A "bypass code" is a way to send printer escape codes to a printer 
without worrying about them being fouled up by the printer emulation 
software (which converts from IBM printer language to the actual printer 
language) or the ASCII/EBCDIC translation process.

They used a sequence of &% as a toggle to switch into and out of 
'bypass' mode.  from there, anything received is in hex. It will be used 
to fashion actual bytes to be sent as-is to the printer.  So for 
example, you might have this:

&%090a0b&%

The leading &% goes into bypass mode.  The 09 (two characters) is used 
to create a byte containing 0x09, and that's sent to the printer as-is. 
  Likewise the 0a is converted to 0x0a, and the 0b is converted to 0x0b, 
and they are sent to the printer as-is.  The &% ends bypass mode, and 
things go back to normal until the next &% appears.

Frankly, the whole thing was a kludge.  A more proper (and IBM blessed) 
solution would be to use Host Print Transform.  Or at least use SCS 
transparency codes if you _must_ send raw escape sequences to the printer.

I-O Corporation used these bypass codes extensively in their devices.... 
  I have written software that works with lp5250d to emulate the way I-O 
handled them.

Unfortunately, my software is for FreeBSD, not Windows.  And I developed 
it under contract, and cannot give it away.  But it wasn't terribly 
difficult to write -- you should be able to write your own.
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