Phil, Have you tried something like this:
http://code.activestate.com/lists/perl-win32-users/30503/ I haven't done this myself, just interested in what you're trying! Mike -----Original Message----- From: Phil Shirley [mailto:pshir...@cuyahogafallslibrary.org] Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2011 10:13 AM To: perl4lib@perl.org Subject: Printing to a Windows receipt printer from a perl script I've written some perl scripts in the past but I've never printed to a printer, and I'm having trouble getting this to work. I'd be grateful for any help you could give me. What I want to do is print to a receipt printer on the parallel port (or in some cases a USB port) of a PC running Windows XP or Windows 2000. Ideally, I'd like to print a scaler or an array to the printer, rather than printing the contents of a file. Actually, the goal is to print the price of items on the checkout receipt at the circ desk. Our III system doesn't provide for this, but I was going to try to intercept the print job using Alphatronics Port Monitor, send the receipt data to a script that looked up each barcode and returned its price, and then printed out the receipt plus the value of what you checked out. Maybe it's not a practical project; at this point I'm trying to get a feel for whether this is something I could do. What I've done: I've installed ActivePerl and nmake on my pc (later I tried Strawberry Perl). I also tried several things for printing: 1. Tried this code: open(PRN, "|lp"); print PRN "hello"; result: error message: 'lp' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. 2. Tried this code: open( LPT, "> lpt1" ) or die "error opening printer port $!\n"; print LPT "hello"; close(LPT); result: no error message, but no printing. 3. Tried installing and use the module "Printer" from cpan but it seems to need Win32::Printer. 4. Tried installing Win32::Printer but it fails the "make". Is there something else I can do? Maybe a different scripting language would make it easier to print in Windows. Phil -- Phil Shirley Technology Services Coordinator Cuyahoga Falls Library Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio 330-928-2117, ext. 109 pshirley at CuyahogaFallsLibrary dot org -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
