Hooking up a plotter

[Brendan Kehoe]

Here's the deal: one of the professors here (Widener University) is
teaching a graphics class, but he's teaching it in Turbo Pascal (I won't
even begin to rave about teaching with an unsupported language). At any
rate, one of the students came to me to see if she could try doing all of
the work on the Suns (Yahoo!). So I taught her how to program in sunview
and all of that good stuff, and so far it's been fine. But today he asked
to have the plotter (an HP 7550A) hooked up to the PC network, thus
hinting that he's gonna be giving some assignments that require it. Well,
what of the student that's doing everything on the Suns? (And doesn't know
Turbo Pascal) I can hook the plotter up physically with no problem.  But
what about actually using the thing? From my memory, much of using the
plotter just requires sending ascii commands like PU (pen up), etc. Ok, I
could teach her how to do that. Am I wrong? Is there anything funky
required that I couldn't find in the plotter manual? (I'm not at the lab,
so I can't RTFM til later tonight.) Anything out there that people have
already done for this kind of thing?  Oh, I'm using a Sun SS1 under 4.1.
Appreciate the help..

Brendan Kehoe | Soon: brendan at cs.widener.edu
For now: kehoe at scotty.dccs.upenn.edu | Or: bkehoe at widener.bitnet
Last resort: brendan.kehoe at cyber.widener.edu