I am not sure how I'd be able to work with a ribbon cable here, hooking up to a G540 which uses a parallel port cable.
I'm quite skilled at splicing but most of my experience says trying to splice a ribbon cable to anything is just a bad idea. The wire's very thin and with a really wide cable like this the mechanical stress of whichever lead is shortest is pretty extreme. I'm no stranger to hacking together hardware, and do quite well at it, but on a mill it's just asking for too much trouble. A broken wire could cause a lot of damage.
At first I thought this would be easy enough to get around, but the more I look at the problem, the more uncertain I am.
Is there a standard part that would adapt the ribbon cable to a DB25 or what?
So far the only thing I can think of is to get a ribbon cable PCB connector and a DB25 PCB connector and design a PCB to tie them together so the G540 can be mated with it... but it's an awful lot to go through to connect these two.