printer

[tim van deelen]

hello again, i had a dot matrix printer that was hooked up to
my computer. i bought a ink jet that was usb port. now my
powerbasic programs do not print. can someone show me my
error. thank you

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[Clay Clear]

DOS does not support USB. For printing to almost ANY printer,
even those that are normally Windows-only printers, from DOS,
I recommend that you take a look at Lance's DOSPRINT library.

http://www.dosprint.com/


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Clay C. Clear

[Steve Smith2]

What you can do (we need some dos support still at work) is share the the printer. Then use the command "NET USE" to assign the shared printer to a local port.

So if you shared the printer with the name "USBPrint", then the command you would use is (at dos prompt):

net use LPT1 \\computername\USBPrint

try that. it should help. I am not 100% correct about the syntax, but try it.

steve


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[Lance Edmonds]

Thanks for the plug Clay!

For background, many USB printers are Windows-only, and wont print even if you can send data to it via a Share. The problem is that Windows-only printers rely on their own printer driver to generate a "page image" in memory, then send it to the printer in a proprietary format.

DOSPRINT was designed to help with this precise problem. A completely functional demo can be downloaded from www.dosprint.com so you can try it out for yourself.

I hope this helps!

Regards,
Lance Edmonds

[Mike Luther]

I cross post a message in the PowerBASIC PB DOS support forum from a
respectable gentleman who frequents it:

Clay Clear
Member
posted October 21, 2002 05:55 PM

DOS does not support USB. For printing to almost ANY printer, even those that
are normally Windows-only printers, from DOS, I recommend that you take a
look at Lance's DOSPRINT library.

http://www.dosprint.com/

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Clay C. Clear

Would anyone know how all this would stack up in that OS/2 supports USB, and
thus a USB device object, might be just another printer device under a DOS-VDM
in OS/2? Heck, if LPT1 is network supported, 'sfarasIknow the DOS session
doesn't know the difference and prints to it. All printer support goes through
the OS/2 mish-mash anyway, right?

Just to be objective about things, grin!

The support forum is an excellent and very helpful resource for those still
working in BASIC:

http://www.powerbasic.com/support/forums

--

--> Sleep well; OS2's still awake!

Mike Luther

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Mike Luther
[email protected]

[Lance Edmonds]

Even if you manage to actually send data to a Windows-only printer, virtually none will actually produce anything on paper since they do not [usually] contain built-in firmware or fonts to be able to actually put something on paper.

Or to put it another way: Windows-only printers use host-based drivers to do the work that a "normal" printer would handle internally.

Unless O/S2 can run Win32 applications, DOSPRINT will not work for you. Sorry!

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