I'd like to set up a 21 year-old 9-pin tractor-feed dot-matrix printer, Okidata Microline 82A for utility printing. For the console, I can direct a file to /dev/lp0 with no problem, but I'd like to improve the output. Specifically, I'd like to have automatic pagebreaks; ability to set the page width and to print from X like any normal printer. Anything else would be gravy.

I've gotten into some of the documentation and I can see there is a lot of information available, but it's multi-layered and, well, I'd like not to spend a career getting it going.

It looks like by default, X wants to output in PostScript format while this printer can (apparently) only take ascii. I think maybe I just need to write a filter and a groff command line, but....

Any guidance is appreciated.