You may soon be referenced to Bruce Sanderson's 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." Win-printers cannot accept plain text ASCII.
Win98 will re-render plain ASCII text into a form required by the regular
Windows print subsystem. 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(SP2+) 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
