Our application has the ability to fall back to DOS-era character based
printing. Of course, these days many printers can't accept ASCII characters.
There's an archive of discussion of this topic here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/119307-45-printing

But how can an application probe a printer using code to discover whether
it's a Windows only printer or not? The user experience is not a good one
when ASCII is sent to a Windows only printer. Thanks for any advice.

Common practice is to assume that almost any modern ink jet printer is a
graphics/windows printer.
In theory, there are registry entires that show the printing capabilities,
and you may be able to actually query the driver.

"clyclopedic" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:%(E-Mail Removed)...
> Our application has the ability to fall back to DOS-era character based
> printing. Of course, these days many printers can't accept ASCII
> characters. There's an archive of discussion of this topic here:
> http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/119307-45-printing
>
> But how can an application probe a printer using code to discover whether
> it's a Windows only printer or not? The user experience is not a good one
> when ASCII is sent to a Windows only printer. Thanks for any advice.
>