Apple II Printer Interfaces, Serial or Parallel

[Great Hierophant]

From what I have read and researched, most Apple II applications which could send output to a printer were not, at least by the time of the //e, especially particular about whether your printer connected via a serial port or a parallel port. This assumes of course that you had the de-facto standards for serial and parallel cards, the Super Serial Card and the Grappler+. At that point, the issue appears to be more of what printer control codes and capabilities did your printer support rather than the interface by which it communicated with the computer. Of course, with a simple ASCII-text printing program, the attached printer did not need to do much. When it came to applications like The Print Shop which supported bitmap graphics or Appleworks with its proportional width fonts, then your printer needed to do more than just print 64 fixed-width characters in full or half-width. But that is really more of an issue of what your printer can support. And of course the standard for most Apple II applications was the ImageWriter line of printers from Apple. Is my understanding more or less correct at the high level?

 

[njroadfan]

On the Apple II, the most commonly supported printers were Apple's own and the Epson MX-80 and compatibles (anything that supported ESC/P 9-pin).

All of Apple's printers use an extended version of the C-Itoh 8510 ESC command set. Apple made non-standard extensions to add color ribbon support and higher resolution support (in the Scribe and ImageWriter LQ). If you didn't own a compatible printer, Orange Micro's Grappler C (later rebranded Grappler 9-pin and featured a mini-DIN 8 vs. a IIc DIN-5) was a serial to parallel printer adapter that could emulate an ImageWriter as well. It converted the ImageWriter ESC codes to Epson ESC/P or a handful of other printers.