Re: anybody there? (yes, and I have a problem)

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Robert wrote: ≪The specs say that it only prints under Win32 operating
systems, and Mac OS 8.6+, which is a characteristic of WinPrinters.≫

I think it's a tad more complicated than that. True enought, we used to
have just two kinds of printers: 1. Real printers that can use some
standard (DOS) driver (mostly HPs and, of course, Postscript; also the
older Epson ESC/P printers). 2. Dumb Winprinters, with no internal
algorithms; they use Windows to do ALL the work. I think there are
actually fewer of these being made now than a while back. But now we seem
to have a tertium quid: printers that actually have a set of print
algorithms ("print engine") in them, but it's designed to work in tandem
with Windows or MacOS AND the maufacturers don't want to be bothered with
any other opsys. Sometimes you can get them to print under DOS (and
*nix), sometimes not, and sometimes partially, in varying degrees. (Hint:
check the Linux lists to see what printers they can get to work. Not a
guarantee, but an indicator.) For instance, my Epson C82 can do a data
dump from Xy over a parallel connection: plain text, no margins, no other
formatting. But that's about it.

The chief thing to keep in mind is that _you can't believe what the
manufacturers tell you._ They cannot believe anyone is using anything but
Gates' garbage, and won't support anything else (except Mac, if they say
so). Robert is absolutely right that we need a list of what printers work
and what don't, but I simply haven't time to compile it now.

The other complication is USB vs. parallel. If you're running 2K or XP,
you can map your USB port to the parallel port, but not under 9x. (Robert
and I went round that mulberry bush a while back, and he posted complete
instructions for doing it under 2K and XP.) Under 9x, only a real network
printer (connected to another computer) can be so mapped.

As for getting LFN, here's a kludgy possibility: from a DOS prompt,
command DIR of the directory and pipe the output to a file (as I gather
you did). CA the resulting file in Xy, Se repeatedly for :NNa{space} (NN
representing the wildcard number function); that is, search for the time
the file was saved, which is the last element in the listing before the
LFN. Begin Define, HOME, end define, and delete the define. The do it for
:NNp{space}. You should then have a nice list, one LFN to a line.
(Wildcard numbers are one of the GREAT things about Xy, and let you do
things undreamed of in other apps.)

Patricia