Re Trouble

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

HP deskjets and lasers that are stated to use PCL--and nowhere use the
code words GDI--will print from XyDOS. You may have to do some extensive
tweaking to get bold, itals, and above-256 ASCII characters, but you can
get reasonable output. I have an HP 850C Deskjet at the office ($4 at a
yard sale) that prints rather nicely using XyWrite's HP LJ2 driver. Of
course, they must have parallel ports. I recently heard it said, by some
knowledgeable types, that USB-only printers by that very fact are
revealed to be GDI printers. (GDI means they use Windows, not a processor
inside the printer, to handle the printing.) As I mentioned the other
day, the newer Epsons cannot print with any real formatting from DOS; the
older Epson inkjets, spec'd as ESC/P, can use the old Epson dot matrix
drivers. I used to have a Stylus Color 800 and used a tweaked version of
the LQ 850 driver to get respectable output.

To sum up, to print from Xy you need a printer
1) that has a parallel port
2) that prints using one of the following: ESC/P, HP PCL, or Postscript
(really does it, not necessarily just "compatible with" those specs)
3 Is NOT a GDI or WinPrinter.

Note that some of the newer and cheaper HPs DO NOT use PCL: the
price-cutting in this market is leading to all sorts of horrible quality
decisions.

Inkjets tend to be cheap in the beginning, but the cost of ink per page
is high versus the same cost for a laser. But lasers draw a lot of power,
so should really be run off a different electrical circuit (not just a
different socket; map your sockets to your circuits and write it down),
from your PC's (unless the PC is a laptop or a very low-powered desktop).

Norman wrote: "The other option is to figure out how to use XyWrite with
my Brother
MFC300C color fax,"
I'd be very much surprised if you could. This model, while not a GDI, or
WinPrinter (that is, it does have a rendering engine in it, and doesn't
rely on Windows to format the output) does not use any recognized-by-DOS
printer control language. I have one (now retired to serve as an
independent fax and copier, since the printer driver kept getting
corrupted and having to be reinstalled, and that was a nightmare), and
was never able to get XyDOS to print to it.
Patricia