not printing in dos or from cmd line

A dell with W2K installed will not print from DOS
programs, nor will it print a dir command from a command
line (dir> lpt1

tried two printers and new parallel cable, no help

Any ideas?

[posted and mailed]

"NathanB" <nsceml@yahoo.com> wrote:

> A dell with W2K installed will not print from DOS
> programs, nor will it print a dir command from a command
> line (dir> lpt1. I tried two printers and new parallel
> cable, no help


I have just finished solving a situation involving a Canon S520, Windows
XP, and printing from the DOS environment. Your situation with Win2K may be
solved by looking into this solution.

In XP, the DOS environment is emulated (not a true DOS). The fact that
INT17 (or INT21) is still provided is important as I will explain later.

The Canon S520 (as well as most modern sub-$150 printers, especially USB)
is what's known as a Win-Printer - as brain-dead and problematic as are
win-modems. It requires the printer driver to re-render the data sent to it
into control signals that fire the nozzles directly. (That's a highly
simplified description.) These printers have no printer control language,
any command and control set, nor any internal fonts.

In a COMMAND.COM window, the files AUTOEXEC.NT and CONFIG.NT are executed.
It is here that you can place a command line to load PRN2FILE as a TSR.
This utility (as well as others: LPT2FILE and PRSPOOL, for example)
redirect the INT17/21 interrupt to itself in order to capture data streams
sent by DOS programs to LPT1.

Note that CMD.EXE, the other command prompt window, does not process
AUTOEXEC.NT and CONFIG.NT (according to my experiments).

DOS-like commands found in the SYSTEM32 folder are, as best as I can tell,
re-written 32-bit programs that do *not* use INT17/21. Hence commands like:
PRINT TEST.TXT
COPY TEST.TXT LPT1:
DIR > LPT1:
go nowhere. According to Alex (more about him shortly), these START from
the command line but run independent of the environment.

So these are bad tests - for me - in Windows NT/2K/XP. A command prompt in
Windows 95/98/Me is a real DOS environment, so your tests with PRN2FILE
would work.

In XP, using a program coded to output via INT17/21 will work. I grabbed
"An-Editor v2.1" by Guy Lachance from Simtel.net and it worked just fine.
(Well, good enough as the program is pre-coded to add the necessary control
codes for an IBM ProPrinter. That put a couple of spaces and an "H" at the
start of the text stream.)

I would encourage you to try the program DOSprn v1.72 by Ignatenko and
Goldberg (http://dosprn.netfirms.com). It's shareware, gives you about 100
documents with an ever-darkening watermark, is not overly obnoxious in the
evaluation mode, and really reasonable to purchase.

DOSprn is constantly watching for a specific file and when it appears,
sends it through the Windows print sub-system. It comes with a default file
of most of the Epson ESC-P control set that converts such formatting as
bold, italic, etc. The latest version 1.72 adds Epson graphics
rasterization.




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