Printing with Windows2000

[Steve Bouffe]

I'm in the process of upgrading our systems to Win2000 and I'm having
problems printing to a dot matrix printer from a DOS box.

The print is fine but it takes around 30sec before printing starts.

Any way to speed this up ?

ZZZzzzzzzzzz...

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[Lance Edmonds]

What method are you using to print? LPRINT, OPEN "LPT1", OPEN "LPT1:", or...?

Local or network printers? How are your spool settings on the Advanced page of the Printer dialog? (probably the "start printing immediately" option would be the best choice here, and "print directly to the printer" could be worthwhile testing too).

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

[Steve Bouffe]

I'm using Lprint and it's a local printer with no printers set up
in Windows.



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[Lance Edmonds]

Righto.

LPRINT does not have any way of explicitly "closing" the printer port, so Windows has to use a no-data "timeout" period to determine (ie, guess/assume) when the print job has finished.

In this case, using "Print directly to the printer" may help though.


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

[OTTO WIPFEL]

You can also print via the parallel port of your machine thus:

OPEN "LPT1:" FOR OUTPUT AS #1
PRINT #1, "Your text . . . . . "
CLOSE #1

The "CLOSE" line should kickstart your printer into action if
you also heed Lance's advice, I consider a MUST !

There is also a guy in this forum who sells an excellent print
utility called DOSPRINT which lets you print directly to WIN printers
from PB-DOS programs

You'll find him browsing for "Dosprint" on the Web.

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[This message has been edited by OTTO WIPFEL (edited February 14, 2002).]

[Lance Edmonds]

Thanks for the plug, Otto!

DOSPRINT can be found at http://www.dosprint.com and solves many printing problems for DOS programmers running their apps in the Windows environment, especially when Windows-only and USB printers come into the picture...

A fully function demo can be downloaded from the website above, and given a complete test drive.

Regards,
Lance