Thanks, Ralf:
Without any additional software, a printer being used from DOS needs to be able to receive plain text, with additional capabilities either through the industry standard ESC/P (developed by Epson, who was for a long time the leader in printers before laser printers started to show up, then they kind of missed the bus) or by being "LaserJet II" (PCL3) compatible.
That rules out my Brother HL-3150CDN colour laser printer.
An additional hurdle is that a lot of (El Cheapo) printers these days aren't actually processing "text/graphics into pixel" themselves anymore, but just expect to get all the final pixel data from the OS, which is not a problem for GUI OS like Windows or macOS, but pretty much is a no-go when printing from DOS. Full stop.
Yes, my printer is GDI only!
DOS as designed only supports good old parallel (as in Centronics) or RS-232 type serial connections. Both of those are rare as hen's teeth on both newer computers and/or printers.
I do have both parallel and serial ports on my Dell OptiPlex GX270 running FreeDOS. I currently use the serial port for my POLAR Sport Tester PE4000 heart-monitor receiver-box.
https://www.suchebiete.com/foto_Polar-Sport-Tester-PE4000-Pulsuhr_Interface,15849589.html
Another possibility is printing on a networked printer, if that printer is accessible through an established network connection. Used to be a breeze back in the days on a Novell network, is a bit harder these days when you require SMB (and likely the nowadays frowned upon SMB 1.x protocol). But the whole networking on DOS these days is lik going down a really dark rabbit hole.
:(
That leaves us once again with the dreaded (from the viewpoint of operability in DOS) USB connected printers. Finding USB drivers, given that the printer is software compatible with DOS as mentioned above, will likely be an exercise in futility.
:( -- members.iinet.net.au/~kilgallin/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
