C.1 Introduction to ESC/P2

This is a description of the ESC/P2 raster commands used by the gimp-print plugin and Ghostscript driver, which is a subset of the complete command set. The full documents are found on http://www.ercipd.com/isv/edr_docs.htm. Note that these are not always correct, and are certainly not complete.

All ESCP/2 raster commands begin with the ‘ESC’ character (1b hex), followed by either one or two command characters and arguments where applicable. Older commands generally have one command character. Newer commands usually have a ‘(’ (left parenthesis) followed by a command character and a byte count for the arguments that follow. The byte count is a 16-bit (2 byte) binary integer, in little endian order.

All arguments listed here are of the form ‘name[bytes]’ where ‘[bytes]’ is the number of bytes that comprise the argument. The arguments themselves are usually one, two, or four byte integers, always little endian (the least significant bits come first). Presumably this is to match Intel processors.

In some cases, the same command sequence identifies different versions of the same command, depending upon the number of bytes of arguments.