Buffers for PPort! Info!

[vacpress]

I am thinking about buffering for PPorts . I have read about 7404, 7414, and UCN series chips. I am curious why someone would want to invert their signals? Other questions.

1. Are there bidirectional buffers? Or does the direction im buffering make my pins less versatile?
2. Is speed a concern with these buffers? 8th-stepping signals are close together at high feed rates?
3. Pull up\down resistors?

I am designing a mainboard, and so far think i will put the pull up options on jumpers and make all my connections generic. I want my device to be more generic than the Axxuss one.. but along the same lines, with some more provisions.. like an onboard 14pin MCU area and prototype area... I mean.. im gonna pay the $60 to get 3 PCBS made... any info would be nice.. Other fatures may be optoisolation and MCU driven configuration via PC. I will make my designs public soon. I have several simple unipolr drives, molduar board layouts, etc. and a 10-page "how to" to build a linear guide... Simple stuff, but well laid out as it was for an Industrial Design class project.

Thanks for info!

[pminmo]

Couple of things, consider using Eagle PCB free software for desing capture and PCB. Then send board info digitally to http://www.olimex.com/ there about as cheap as you can get for proto pcb's. I paid $27 including shipping for 4 double sided solder mask silk screened boards!
As far as buffering the printer port. Are you looking to drive long cables? As designed the PC printer port should easily drive 8'. Where the problem comes in is receiving those signals. Use a slow logic device such as a cmos 40106 schmidt trigger with a rc network on the input. A low impedance series resistor to a node of a pull up resistor and a cap to gnd.

Phil