On 9/27/2013 4:13 PM, Jong wrote:
Message
HI everyone:
Just wanted to share that after years of trying to print to USB
printer I finally gave up last year printing anything. Some
discussion about outputting in HTML last year and networked printers
-- too much trouble to arrange. As we all know, parallel port pretty
much don't exist anymore, just USB.
Now, I just realized that all these years I could have used the built
in Microsoft XPS printer. For those of you not familiar with this,
it's a virtual printer built into windows.that turns your DP output
into a .XPS document which be pulled into any web browser or modern
word processor. From there, you just print to whatever available
printer you want.
1. You'll need DPSpool to make it work: File>Select Printers>
select Microsoft XPS from dropdown list.
2. When print job is done, pop up screen will ask you to name document
and what folder to save it to (I recommend desktop so you don't lose it).
3. Double clicking on the XPS icon in your desktop automatically
retrieves in IE (or you can open it up in your word processor).
4. Finally, print it up anyway you like (ctrl-P)
Bonus from this method is that you can attach output to any email
without even using the printer.
Some questions to ponder:
1. Is the Microsoft XPS printer convertng ASCII into HTML?
2. WIll margins and formatting be preserved for forms and multiple
page docs (so far it seems to be after using it twice)
3. Is it possible to automate steps I have outlined to get it
directly to printer? Seems like a batch file of some sort could
accomplish this but not sure.
From DP Dinosaur Club member,
Jon Ong
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Hi Jon,
If you're printing through DPSpool, you know you can print directly to
any Windows-supported printer (including USB or network printers),
right? So your interim step of going through an XPS file isn't really
necessary unless you need to archive an electronic copy of the print job.
As for XPS, an XPS document is similar to a PDF document in that the
document is supposed to look virtually the same on any printer. So
margins and formatting are preserved. However, it isn't HTML. It's
actually XML (or XAML). An interesting overview is found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_XML_Paper_Specification
A "PDF printer" works well for this too, and a PDF might be readable on
more systems than an XPS file.
Free PDF printer apps are plentiful, for example:
www.bullzip.com
www.cutepdf.com
And according to the documentation, the Bullzip printer is supposed to
let you specify an action to be performed after a PDF is created. So you
could set it up to automatically print the created PDF file using Adobe
Reader or some such utility.
Tim Rude
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