Re: tilde; DOS printing

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

The XyWrite default is to use the tilde for the "soft" hyphen--the one
you put in to show the hyphenation algorithm where to break a word if it
won't all fit on a line. And yes, you can change it. But you change it
in one of the default files. And to load them, you have to give
EDITOR.EXE those files' fully qualified path names. And if they're in
PROGR~1, EDITOR cannot find them until the default is reset. Now one
could rename XWSTART.INT (the XyWin equivalent of STARTUP.INT) something
else, load EDITOR.EXE, set the default hyphenation character from the
command line, and then run the renamed INT file. But what a kludge!
	As for DOS printing, 1) ESC/P, Epson's printer control language, is
another spec to look for. Most of the Epson Stylus Color printers can
emulate one or the other of their dot matrix printers; e.g., the Stylus
Color 800 emulates the LQ850. The exact fonts don't always work (e.g.,
Courier comes out as a sans serif font), but you can get output.
2) I think when you do COPY filename.ext lpt1, you have to issue the
page eject or file end character at the end when printing to a laser
printer; that was so even back when DOS was king of the hill. According
to a very useful book I have, one should be able to get a file to a
printer from either the RUN dialog box or a dos prompt with this command
copy /b filename.ext lpt1:
Note the colon after lpt1; the "/b" tells the OS to send it as binary
data. If you were doing it from the RUN box, you might (depending on your
path) have to preface it with command /c
3) But here's an interesting sidelight on DOS printing. The old DOS
editor (editor.com) that people not so fortunate as to have XyWrite used
to use to edit batch files and the like, still exists in Windows (at
least through 98, 2d ed.), and is much more powerful than pathethic
Notepad (it can handle several files at once, as opposed to Notepad's
one). So I decided to set it up on a friend's PC as an alternative to
Notepad. It couldn't print to her Canon printer! Obviously, the Canon
requires the Windows printing system to do anything. (This was in a DOS
box in Windows, not a boot to DOS.)
Patricia