printing sideways

[David Venable]

Is there any way to print sideways (landscape) from powerbasic?
The extent of my printing experience is lprint. Anyway, if
anyone has anything (other than commercial) I'd appreciate it
greatly. Thanks.

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[Lance Edmonds]

You can do it by sending bitmapped-graphics to most DOS-compatible printers. It is a lot of work creating the image in memory or on disk, then sending it to the printer in the specific format the printer supports.

Some laser printers have a native landscape mode that can be set with escape codes, but these are in the minority.

Basically, you'll need to include various solutions in your code to cater to a range of printers, and allow the user to select which type of printer they have.

In one word, this is painful, and if your experience is like mine, you'll find that every week there are fewer printers on the market that can be used with your software.

That said, it is NOT impossible to do... just very time consuming, and you may need access to a whole bunch of different printers to test your code on.

However, for a printer <U>independent</U> method, you may wish to seriously consider a commercial solution, such as DOSPRINT. DISCLAIMER: I wrote DOSPRINT and have a commercial interest in it, but I wrote it to help with these exact kinds of problems.

I hope this helps!

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Lance
PowerBASIC Support
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[Don Ward]

What printer do you want to print to?


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