Printing plain text to dot matrix printers

Got an old dot matrix printer around and you want to print out some plain text? Plug it into your computer and launch the Printer prefs panel, then click Add. Your printer should come online. Close the preferences panel.

Now launch a Terminal window and “cat” a file to your printer. For example, if you want to print the file blah.txt to a printer on parallel port 1, you would type:


cat blah.txt > /dev/parallel/parallel1