Print Speed Problems

[Rover]

I have an old Panasonic KXP1092 dot matrix printer that was being run by
Paradox DOS program. It would print as the carriage went both
directions. I have that same printer set up to print from Access 2000
and now it only prints as the carriage goes to the right. Half as fast.
How do I correct that with out buying a new printer. And, if I must
buy a new printer, it has to be dot matrix to print my 3 part form.

TIA

Jim

 

[Rover]

I'm running WinXP Pro

 

[Ron Weiner]

Jim

Without knowing what/how you are printing from Access 2000, it is almost
impossible to help you. The culprit is likely the windows printer driver
you are using, but since we haven't any idea what you need to do I am not
sure how to help.

But here is a thought. Train your access app to dump the text you print on
your preprinted form to a file, and then copy the file to the printer port
that the old Panasonic is plugged into. This method will completely bypass
any Windows printer driver, and should give you performance similar to the
performance you got with the old Paradox DOS app. Only trick is to create
the output file. There aint gonna' be no wizzywig, drag and drop, or any
other fancy RAD tool to help you. This is the way we did it in the olden
days embedding printer escape codes, counting characters in a line, and
thinking it and we were totally cool. Little did we know. ;-)

Ron W

 

[Rover]

I'm just doing a standard report from a query. All that I need to do is
make it go fast. I'm not sure what other information you want me to
supply. I'm running winXP Pro. The DOS Paradox app is still on this
machine and it still prints in both directions (fast).

Thanks a lot though. That was going to be my next step to try and get
A2K to output to a file. Access 2K doesn't like it if you don't have a
printer setup in windows to "print" your output to. It doesn't know how
to format it. I'll work on that.

I had to jump through hoops to get it to be fixed font and look just
like the old form and now THIS...

p.s.
I've embedded those escape codes and counted characters too.

Jim