Dos program and USB printer

  • Thread starter Thread starter Farouk Dindar
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Farouk Dindar

We are using a old very reliable dos program for some of my office work
on our win 2k system. (medical billing)

This program is written by a programmer that we do not like to bother.

It sends its output to a HP compatible printer on lpt 1

The old HP pacard laser jet printer is giving too may paper misfeeds.

I would like to replace it with HP Laser Jet 1012.

How can I be certain that the this USB printer will work with the Dos
program?

Farouk Dindar
 
It is extremely unlikely that your DOS program will work with the USB
printer.

It's about time to retire that old DOS program.
 
It is extremely unlikely that your DOS program will work with the USB
printer.

It's about time to retire that old DOS program.
Click to expand...

There are many advantages to us in using the dos program.

It is very compact and and debugged. I can backup my entire
program and the billing data on a 32 meg usb stick

I found this link on the web and will give it a shot .

http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders/printfromdos.htm

I am going to try the Printer pooling

=================
http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders/Glossary.htm#PrinterPool

To enable printer pooling:

1. Open the Properties of the Printer to be pooled

2. Select the Ports tab

3. Add a check mark to the Printer Pooling check box

4. Click on the port(s) corresponding to the print device(s) that are to
be part of the pool to add a check mark to them

5. Click OK
================

Farouk Dindar

Farouk Dindar
 
Many new laser printers still have parallel ports, in addition to USB. I'm
using a Samsung ML-1450, on the parallel port...works great!

Bill Crocker
 
HI,
I have several of my old DOS applications still out there
working and my clients won't switch them.
Here is what I did for them. If you're on a network, share
the USB printer on one machine, then setup a capture for
the printer port to print to the shared USB printer.
In a DOS batch file or Windows CMD file, put this-
NET USE LPT1 //servername/printername /Yes

where servername is the name of the computer sharing the
printer and printername is the name given to the printer
share. So for instance if the HP printer is connected to
Julie's machine and called HP the line would be -

NET USE LPT1 //JULIE/HP /YES

then in the batch file, you can call your DOS program
right after like this -

NET USE LPT1 //JULIE/HP /YES
MEDBILLING

If you're not on a network, you can set one up very
quickly by getting a print server. which is a box with a
network connection on one side and a printer connection on
the other. Works almost like magic.

Hope this helps,
chris
 
[posted and mailed]

(e-mail address removed) (Farouk Dindar) wrote in

Someone said:
Here's my standard reply when I see messages relating to W2KSP3/4 and
printing from DOS apps. It may apply to your situation.


=================
Did you perchance install Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 or 4? I've been
hearing that Windows 2000 loses the ability to render plain text to the
special printing mode (GDI) that Windows uses after SP3/4 is installed
(especially SP4).

You may soon be referenced to Bruce Sanderson's most excellent article
describing the process to redirect LPT or PRN output to a shared printer
(regardless how it is connected). His article explains better the same
concepts you may have researched in MS Knowledgebase articles.
Sanderson's article is fine as far as it goes.

I'm assuming that you know for a fact whether or not your printer is
what are coming to be known as "Win-Printers," as brain-dead as are "Win-
Modems." Odds are very good that printers that connect only by USB are
"Win-Printers." Win-printers cannot accept plain text ASCII.

Note - Win98 will re-render plain ASCII text into a form required by the
regular Windows print subsystem. However, If you are running Win2K or XP,
those operating systems are unwilling to re-render ASCII output to the
inate methodologies of the printing subsystem. In other words, unless the
printer can understand a plain text data stream, you will need a utility
to give Windows what it needs.

If they are *not* Win-Printers, then we can look elsewhere.

If they are Win-Printers, and such as I mentioned before, Win2K(SP3+) and
WinXP will require a small, neat, and inexpensive utility to capture the
ASCII output and present it in a form compatible to the operating
system's print subsystem. I recommend DOSPrn <http://www.dosprn.com>.
There are others.
========================

Brian Smither
Smither Consulting
 
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