Edmund Swylan wrote:
I have tried the FILE: approach - with LX-300+, a 9 pin
Epson. The Win95 FILE: seems to be unknown in the DOS
window; so I did the printing in Notepad. The .prn
turned out 401 bytes long. The original .txt was 10 bytes:
8 letters plus 0x0d 0x0a. I then changed the printer setting
back to LPT1 and printed the .prn from DOS (window) EDIT.
The original eight letters, in something like subscript font,
were printed; but so were many spaces and some other characters.
It looks like under Win95 .prn is not exactly what goes to
the port. Also, the eight letters ('abcdefgh') must have
been encoded in some (to me) unusual way: I do not readily see
any 8 consecutive bytes or half-words in the .prn. Nor do
carriage returns and line feeds come in pairs.
By default, Windows prints a lot of stuff as bitmaps. If you can send me the prn file, I can have a look at it and explain its content to you.
BTW, the proper way of printing prn files is this: copy /b filename.prn lpt1Opening the prn file in EDIT will have all kinds of funny effects as the printer control commands will become misinterpreted.
In Windows 95, you can capture whatever a DOS application sends to the printer port. While configuring the printer, you just have to tell Windows that DOS applications will be using this printer, too. (If I am not mistaken, Win95 is so long ago for me...) Windows will then intercept all DOS print commands and translate the output, then send it through its Windows printer driver.
The best thing to start is probably your printer manual. It should contain all the sequences your printer can understand. After that, you just have to make up a small programm that can send such command sequences to the printer port. I will check if I have some introductory material somewhere...
I could probably whip up a program for sending stuff to your printer in QBasic (must be lying around here somewhere *g*) :)
Best regards, AndreP.S. Please make sure to CC: the Freedos Mailinglist instead of BCC: it. It is much more comfortable if I don't have to add the mailinglist to the recipients list each time I reply to your mails :) (yes, I AM lazy *g*)
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