What does the ":" do? Is this documented any where?
Mike Sinclair
daniele-bmb wrote:
>
> I've done this experience:
> The commands
> OUTPUT LPT1
> PRINT reportname .....
> send output to Windows print manager and spooling (very slow)
>
> otherwise the commads:
> OUTPUT LPT1:
> PRINT reportname ...
> (note ":" after LPT1)
> send output directly to the printer bypassing Windows control. (very fast,
> like DOS)
>
> Hope this help
> Daniele
> ---------------------------------
>
> Dear R:Base folks
>
> I CAN"T believe there is not a simple solution to this ridiculous problem
> Frank Conroy and I ran into this week in installing a conversion and
> enhancement of an R:Base for DOS application to R:Base for Windows.
>
> Working with Frank, Karen Tellef and William Mason, we have set up a slick
> inventory control system for a company that is in the TRANSFER business.
> They are at the fish pier in Boston, and their facility consists of a large
> refrigerated warehouse space with many truck bays. Trucks are pulling up all
> day (and night sometimes) with loads of fresh or frozen fish, which stay
> very little time in the facility before they are shipped out again. Four
> salespeople work their butts off in a cramped little office at the edge of
> the warehouse entering orders and printing out bills of lading. THey are
> harrassed all day by truckers impatiently waiting for their paper work so
> they can get on the road. The pace is very fast; to accomodate this, they
> purchased a high speed Lexmark 370 printer which when printing in Draft mode
> prints 700 or so characters per second. When the application ran in DOS, all
> four of them could be entering and printing these bills of lading (on pre
> printed forms with carbons) nonstop and the printer would be printing them
> so fast that by the time they pressed [Enter] and got up from their chairs
> to walk the four steps to the printer, despite the high volume and four
> stations sending bills all day, the bill of lading was done and sitting
> there waiting to be torn off.
>
> Monday, we installed the new system, where we had put little attention on
> this bill of lading as a minor and easy report and put attention instead on
> the very complex inventory control system, and bar coding application we
> were implementing.
>
> IMMEDIATELY, we learned about the Achille's Heel effect. The bill of lading
> report was suddenly taking so long to print (25 - 30 seconds per for the
> simplest one item bill) that they were backed up to the point where they
> didn't get out of work Monday, a very busy day, till 1 AM. We MUST speed up
> this printing by Friday or they are going to go back to the DOS app until we
> can figure it out.
>
> Here's the details:
>
> Four PC's, running Windows 98.
> Windows 2000 is the server system
> All printing goes to a Lexmark 370 Printer.
> All printing cycles through a PC which IS very slow, just a Pentium.
> The Lexmark has four fonts built into it:
> Fast Draft, at 700 CPS
> Draft, at 630 CPS
> Courier and Gothic letter quality at 150 CPS
>
> Tech support at Lexmark suggested we use a font in R:Base that matched one
> of the built in fonts. For now, the best we have been able to do has been
> by:
> * Using Century Gothic Regular 10 font
> * Under Windows print manager, setting the print settings to print coarse
> text, graphics at the simplest resolution
> * Using a PRNSETUP "printer name" command in the R:Base for WIndow program
> for this printer followed by an OUTPUT PRINTER command
>
> The result is that as each new BOL prints, you can watch the printer take
> 5-6 seconds "setting up", then about another 9 seconds to print the simplest
> of the BOL's. Clearly, it's printing at the 150 CPS speed. Originally, the
> printer WAS printing a line, then cycling back to the left before starting
> again. With the changes we figured out, at least it now prints left to
> right, next line right to left, and so on, hence the cutting the time in
> half. (The ideal, which they had under DOS, was NO delay on starting and
> maybe 3 seconds to print even a complex BOL) On the more complex BOL's,
> something wierd happens. The report is based on a detail table, with many
> rows sometimes per bill. To save paper, the report prints as a group header
> the lot number and item name (eg, Lot 142 Cod) and then creates in a footer
> a list of the weights of the individual boxes (sometimes as many as 100) as
> a long text string with commas between them which wraps onto several lines
> to print the weights of the boxes being shipped from that lot. In DOS, as
> in R:Base for Windows, the report CREATION is very fast. In DOS, the
> PRINTING is also very fast, with each line printing right out. In WIndows,
> these individual lines of weights cause a second or so delay between the
> lines! The sales reps and truckers are losing patience fast.
>
> In addition to the above we have tried:
>
> * Printing to a file; the report doesn't print correctly and the printer
> still doesn't use the draft font when we TYPE it out.
>
> Frank's had a brilliant idea for a temporary fix to stave off the wolves
> which we will be trying today / tomorrow: In WIndows app, don't print, just
> flag a row in the bill of lading table as ready for printing (such a column
> already exists and is indexed). Then create a little DOS program that will
> connect to the database and in a constant loop look for rows in the table
> where status = ready to print, and print the BOL.
>
> We will try this and hope it works. But I can't believe that we can't get
> R:Base for Windows to print to a high speed dot matrix printer in fast draft
> mode!!!!! SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE must be doing this!
>
> Any and all ideas are welcome!
>
> Thanks
>
> David Blocker
