Here's my standard reply when I see messages relating to W2KSP3/4 and
printing from DOS apps. It may apply to your situation.
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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." (With a few exceptions, printers that connect only by USB are
"Win-Printers." If the printer box does NOT say "Supported operating
systems: DOS", then probably you have a Win-Printer.) Win-printers cannot
accept plain text ASCII.
Regarding the matter of using the (supposedly) simple method of sending
what would probably be plain-text (ASCII) directly to the LPT port. I've
been told that the command-line applets Copy, Print, and the redirector
function have been converted to 32-bit models and hook into Windows' GDI
functions. That means you can't get away from the "I can't print from a
DOS window" scenario in the above operating systems. Not even booting to
DOS will work because you need those GDI functions to print to a Win-
Printer.
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.
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Brian Smither
Smither Consulting