RE: USB printers again

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

I installed DOSPRINT and had a look at it (cannot test right now as
there's no working printer hooked up here; long, boring story). It
doesn't simply route DOS output to a USB printer. It also translates the
ESC/P codes that most DOS apps can print to the Windows Printing System
coding that is a Redmond secret. (That probably accounts for its high
price: they had to sign a contract in blood with M$ to get access the
API.) The only thing is that ESC/P is not that robust a PCL; after all,
it was designed for dot matrix printers. And we have, courtesy of Carl
and Robert, a free way of doing the same thing using Postscript, a far
more powerful PCL--indeed, a true page description language: XyShell,
along with the copy-left Ghostscript and Ghostview. The question is, has
Adobe so "upgraded" the Postscript spec that the Xy drivers no longer
work? I may have mentioned that the 47N one has been giving the office
printer fits, but that may have been a driver that I had tweaked for an
old TI Microwriter some years ago. Will run some tests with clean
versions of the several Xy PS drivers over at the office and see what's
what. Don't look for results much before the weekend; Tuesdays and
Wednesdays are bedlam here.
	By the by, another benefit to using Postscript is that you can then
convert to a PDF, using the very cheap German utility I've mentioned
before.
Patricia