opening prn files

  • Thread starter Thread starter Glenda Perkins
  • Start date Start date
G

Glenda Perkins

I need to open some file pages that I printed to " prn "
files instead of my printer. For some reason I can't open
the files. I have tried notepad and word etc. It comes up
with jibberish.They were pages of study material for an
online class I was taking . My printer is slow so I just
printed to files instead of the printer and I thought I
could just go back and open the pages and print them.
Thanks for your help .
 
Sorry, if you "print to file" all that happens is that the output of the
printer driver (typically, PostScript or some version of PCL) is sent to the
file instead of to the printer. Meaning, it's no longer human-readable, and
the only thing that can make it human-readable is the printer that the
output was intended for.

If you have the printer locally connected to the parallel port, you can do
"copy /b foo.prn lpt1:". If the printer is shared out from a server, you can
do "copy /b foo.prn \\<yourserver>\<yourshare>".

If you don't have the printer, you're pretty much outta luck unless the
output is in PostScript. You can use GhostScript to view the file (though
depending on the file, that can be very flaky), and any number of PostScript
utilities to work with that file.
 
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