Msg: Re: Winprint

For this user, winprint appears to be the best overall solution. It's fast, it's free and it offers the Courier font control vDos's dosprinter utility lacks. To get underscores, use xy3's generic driver, rather than Epson.

Per winprint, note that it's better to specify top and bottom margins, however small, and enter a value in the lines per inch field (6), rather than entering a value for lines per page, which can lead to inaccurate page breaks and other anomalies.

Another very good and free solution, using PCL6, was detailed by Edward Mendelson recently on the vDos discussion site. This involves printing directly to a PCL6 printer (rather than printing first to a screen PDF, which vDos does automatically if a PCL6 driver is loaded and pcl16.Exe is in the vDos directory).

Once his routine is set up (and note that it was necessary to implement his last provisional step in xy3), just load an HP LJ driver at startup and print normally with the ty command. It's a bit slow compared to winprint -- a 5 or 6 second delay for every print command -- but otherwise provides all the power of PCL6. The default font is HP's 12 point Dark Courier, which is more readable than Courier New. Document-embedded pt and pi escape commands do appear to work, though I haven't tested exhaustively.

From: Kari Eveli
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2015 2:09 AM
Subject: Re: Winprint

Jordan and John,

Did you get all this to work to your satisfaction? I have not tested
this, and normally do not print from Xy, so I am just asking out of
curiosity.

There are other utilities that could be of use for this kind of setup,
like this freeware program: http://lerup.com/printfile/
Read more about it at:
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/usbprint.html#printfilemethod

Then there is this pcl program:
Demo: http://www.pclreader.com/and corresponding paid software:
http://www.pclworks.com/

Best regards,

Kari Eveli
LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)
lexitec@xxxxxxxx

*** Lexitec Online ***
Lexitec in English: http://www.lexitec.fi/english.html
Home page in Finnish: http://www.lexitec.fi/

4.2.2015, 16:24, John Paines (Redacted sender mailto:vf200@xxxxxxxx for DMARC)
wrote:

> Winprint does appear to expect a rudimentary, generic driver, like
> Epson. If you load a HP PCL driver, it won't work. Using an Epson
> driver or the generic driver, I can get bold with winprint, but no
> underscores. So it is limited. The default Dosprinter utility which
> comes with vDos (but for which you have to pay and which, in my
> experience, doesn't handle courier fonts properly) also uses an Epson
> driver, but will do underscores.
>
>
> If you want to use a PCL driver, with more text control, download
> PCL16.exe from Edward Mendelson's site (it's bundled with a
> ghostscript utility) and place it in the vdos directory. Then load an
> HP laser driver and print normally using ty" command. This will print
> to screen with a PDF, which you can in turn send to the printer or
> save to disk.