Controlling printer / plotter using mach2?

[stuart76]

Ive had a play with Mach2 and am controlling 4 stepper motors which will one day be made into a 4 axis mill.
My question is, can I get mach 2 to move or control a printer or plotter?
I have an old plotter which still works (moves and does pen changes)
I connected it to the printer port but cant seem to get any movement using Mach2. The plotter does have servos but all the controlling boards are in the plotter so Im asuming it just needs step/dir through printer port to the right pins. Has anyone done this before or is there something Im just missing here?
Thanks

[neilw20]

Some person very knowledgeable in software needs to write a driver (or may have already) so that the output from the port is the same language as the plotter. For instance HP and ROLAND plotters can understand HPGL.
Mach3 outputs signals suited to stepper motor hardware driver modules.

[project5k]

Stuart...
Have you had any luck finding out anything on this, i have a plotter too, and all i can come up with is something called winline, but its outside my price range right now...

[neilw20]

What winline does is optimize HPGL vectors to stop machine gun redundant penup-pendown sequences. It won't work with MachX.
I believe it's intended purpose related to early poorly written drivers for plotters which would do a penup at the end of a vector, and pendown at the start off the next vector, even if doing a straight line made up of two joining vectors in the same direction. This sounded like a machine gun, destroyed pens and took forever, but sure kept the expensive pens from ever getting blocked. That's museum stuff now.

google gcode to HPGL will give you plenty to figure out how to do what you want.

I found the opposite straight away. Keep looking..
HPGL to GCODE conversion so that MachX can understand HPGL.
http://www.metalgeek.com/archives/2004/06/03/000028.php