I want to be able to control the print head of a Canon PIXMA iP5000 (inkjet) for printing.

This printer has the finest resolution of any I.J. Printer made and it is this resolution I need to be able to utilise and control.

I do have access to Cannon's Official Printer programing codes should they be required.

Can anyone assist please.

I anticipate this would be done using C++.

If you have the programming guide then what's the problem?

No I do not have the programing guide, that is not provided.

Canon will provide the specific codes for qualified users of their equipment. These codes enable one to call a wide range of canon printer functions and commands e.g. Set the paper gap between the paper and the print head, which for ASCII is PAPERGAP, also they give it for HEX 50 41 50 45 52 47 41 50.

However within the codes they provide, I cannot work out how to control the print head, so that I can get just one ink jet point to print without any input/ouput from any of the other inkjet colours (e.g if I select Blue there will still be doplets from other colours on the paper despite the fact that I selected blue and blue only), and such that, I can get the Jet to produce a single 1 picolitre thickness of line on the horizontal or on the vertical, for a specified length in each case (1 picolitr is the size of droplet produced at a resolution of 9600 per inch on the horizontal). Most photographic printers only go down to 4 or 2.5 picolitres at the least.

Using the normal software tools provided by Canon within the printer software, the minimum thickness of line is about 50 picolitres thick, which is way too thick. No matter what the resolution (dpi) of the background image frame is set up at and the dpi print image is set at (e.g 1 pixel thick), the printer and the colour selected by choice, the printer will always print the line too thick (ie. about 50 picolitres). The ink jet output, under microscope examination, is producing individual 1 picolitre droplets, but will not print 1 picolitre droplets in 1 continuous straight line, using a single colour. To stop it doing this, I must have a command and control set, that controls the print head so that it will print the line using only a single print head ink jet of my choice, which will provide a series of single picolitre droplets onto the paper.

The Codes provided by Canon do not explain how that can be done. Having spoken with them at length about this problem, they gave me access to these codes so that I could do a program to control the print head to achieve this.

Ancient Dragon, did you think you might have some ideas about dealing with this problem?

Since I have not seen their programming guid I have no ideas. Did you talk to one of their programmers or just to one of their know-nothing help support people? If their programmers can not help you then maybe what you want to do can't be done their their printers.

I initially talked to their help people who agreed it was beyond them they pushed it up to level 2 and they came back with the offer of access to their various pdf files containing their printer programing codes. I now have some eight of these command files.

Does anyone have any API 's to use with printers ?

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