Printing from XyDOS to a network printer

[Wolfgang Bechstein bechstein@xxxxxxxx]

I think this is topic has come up before, but unfortunately I can't
recall what transpired at the time.

I am currently using a Brother HL-1240 laser printer, a neat little
machine that unlike many other newer printers works fine in DOS and
therefore is perfectly usable with Xy4DOS. Provided that I hook it up
directly to the parallel port of the computer on which Xy is running,
that is. When the same printer is connected to an Ethernet print server
on our small home network, Windows applications (including Xy for
Windows) can use it fine, but Xy4DOS merely gives me the message "Write
Fault" followed by "Printer Error", regardless of which Xy printer
driver I load. Now I realize that this is less of a Xy problem than of
the DOS session (under Windows 98 SE, Japanese version) apparently not
being able to send the LPT 1 output to the network printer, but is there
anything that can be done about this?

On the Windows side of things, I did look in the Properties of the
Brother printer driver and tried to allocate the network printer port to
LPT1, but the setup screen wouldn't let me do that.

This is not a life-threatening situation, since in a pinch I can print
the Xy4DOS file by using Xy4Win, but it would be nice to omit that
additional step.

And while we're rehashing old topics, may I slip in another question
here, this time regarding XyWin (version 4.13). It is a known buglet
that under certain conditions, XyWin will print everything from the
second page onward in "black on gray" if the Windows background color
has been set to something other than the default bright white (the first
page always comes out fine). On another machine (which is in another
country and unreachable at the moment), I think I had a solution to this,
i.e. I had the Windows background color set to light gray and printing
still worked fine, but on the laptop I'm currently using, I can't seem
to find the solution or workaround (other than resetting the Windows
colors to the default). Any hints on this will also be highly welcome.

Wolfgang Bechstein
bechstein@xxxxxxxx