"If you want to send just text to the parallel printer, then the procedure is the same irrespective of HP, Epson, or for that matter any super-duper make as long as it CONFORMS to Centronics."

Unfortunately, that is not necessarily the case these days.
Some printers (maybe called "WinPrinters" or something) have absolutely no intelligence at all - they do need Windows (or someting else on the sending machine) even to render plain text into a printable image.

http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworl...ux101.html

I don't know if this applies to any HP printers.

BTW: note that Centronics has nothing to do with it.
Centronics merely defines the hardware interface between a printer and whatever's driving it - it has no idea whether the information going through the interface is plain text, PCL, HPGL, PostScript, bitmapped graphics, etc, etc, etc,...