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Printing In General
The Laser Print Cost Recovery Program has greatly changed the way printing
is done from WAM PCs. The biggest change, depending on the application,
is that you may not always have seamless printing. Printing from Windows
applications is very straightforward. Printing from DOS applications is
a little more complex, but still relatively easy.
For DOS applications, the user must print from the application in the
normal manner and then send the file to the print queue. Printing from
the application is done as usual.
- The user uses the Send File to
Printer item under Main Utilities under the main
menu.
- This application is an expanded version of the
NPP for Windows window that appears
when printing from a Windows application.
Note: that the user doesn't have
to print the default file (c:\output.fil).
- From the window, the user may specify any file as long as the printer will
accept it.
This is very handy for quickly printing a PostScript file or a text file.
- After choosing the appropriate file and verifying other information, the user
will be asked for a print account and password. Assuming all the information is
correct and enough money is in the account, the job is queued and printed.
Things to Remember
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The file you send to the printer must either be PostScript or text.
The print queue will reject binary files. If the file is text, the print
queue will convert it to PostScript. Sometimes users may want to use the
A2PS program to generate the PostScript file themselves. One advantage
of using A2PS is that it will do "2 up" printing (two portrait pages on
one landscape page). For text output this can cut the number of pages in
half. Another advantage of A2PS is that you can have a header with the
filename, date and time. A2PS has many options and supports many things.
Run A2PS ? from a DOS Prompt for more information on A2PS.
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One of the most common problems occur when a user does not wait long
enough for c:\output.fil to be generated before they try and send it to
the printer. The result is that they get incomplete or no output even though
they did everything else correctly. The best and most generic thing to
do is to wait until the hard drive light stops flashing before they try
to send the file to print queue.
Printing Windows Applications
Windows applications do not usually have their own custom print driver.
The Windows operating system handles printing for the applications. What
this means is any Windows program should use the WAM printing setup. It
doesn't matter if the application is a WAM Windows application or a Windows
application the user purchased.
For Windows applications printing is as seamless as it can be.
- Simply
print as usual from the application's menu system. The usual print window
appears, asking how many copies, etc.
- After entering the appropriate information,
an NPP for Windows window containing various printing-related information
appears.
- After clicking on print, the user must enter a print account and
password. If the information is correct and there is enough money in the
user's account, the job is queued and printed.
In earlier versions of the Laser Print Cost Recovery software the user
had to print from the application, which would print to a file called c:\output.fil.
Once the file was generated by the application, the user had to go to the
WAM main menu and send the file to the print queue, as they must now do
with DOS applications.
Printing Text from a DOS Application
using WLPT1ON/OFF
WAM DOS applications like WordPerfect for DOS are already set up to print
PostScript to c:\output.fil, and don't require anything from the user other
than going through the menu system to send the file to the printer. User's
applications get a little more complicated. We can't tell you the specifics
of how to print from each possible application, but here's a good start.
The most common application a user wants you to help them print from
is a DOS text based application. For example, they want to print the results
and the input to the BASIC program they just ran. You can't just redirect
output because you need to capture the real time input and output. There
are two programs that facilitate printing from DOS text application under
these circumstances
Running WLPT1ON/OFF
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Just run WLPT1ON
from the command line before running the user's program. WLPT1ON is just
a batch file that does a CAPTURE for the LPT1 port.
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Now run the user's
program and generate output to LPT1. Generating output may take the form
of using <Shift>+<Print on and off>, or having the program print
ASCII text to PRN or LPT1.
Note:In the Windows environment, <Shift>+<PrintScreen>
and <Ctrl>+<PrintScreen> only works if the application is running
in full screen text mode.
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After the output has been generated, exit the
program and run WLPT1OFF from the command line. WLPT1OFF will end the capture
and tell you what you need to do from there to send the output to the printer.
Another situation you may encounter is that a user will have an application
that can generate PostScript output. In this case there are several options.
If you can configure the program to print the output to a file (c:\output.fil),
then all you have to do is tell the application to print to a file you
can send to the printer. One word of caution - make sure all work has been
saved before trying to do any of the above.
Printing Text from a DOS Application
the Hard Way
If you find that the WLPT1ON/WLPT1OFF commands are not working properly
for whatever reason, here is a more direct (but less user friendly) way
of capturing the user's text output.
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The first step is to capture anything sent to an LPT device (LPT1 in
this case) and redirect it to a file. The command to do this is:
CAPTURE
/CR=capture.out /NA /L=1
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This command will cause anything sent to LPT1
(or PRN) to be sent the the file "capture.out". You must run this command
from the F: drive (or change the pathname of the file). CAPTURE can only
spool data to a file on a Novell drive.
- Now generate the output on the LPT1 device. The final step in generating
the file is to end the capture. You end the capture using the command:
ENDCAP /L=1
- When you end the capture, any spooled data will be written to the
"capture.out"e;
file that you will be able to view, copy, delete, or print.
Printing DOS Graphics
from a Windows Environment
Windows 3.1 running in enhanced mode allows a DOS application to run in
a window and still display graphics. This only works if the DOS application
uses a normal supported VGA mode. The easiest way to see if it works for
an application is to try it. If it doesn't work then you have to try and
capture the graphics from a full screen DOS environment using the information
in the "Printing DOS Graphics from a DOS Environment" section. Depending
on the application and setup you may even have to completely exit Windows
to get a true DOS environment for things to work.
If running the graphics application in a window does work, you can copy
the contents of the current window to the Windows clipboard by using
<ALT>+<PrintScreen>.
From there you can paste the resulting bitmap into any application that
supports the clipboard and print it. Be aware when you do this that any
areas of the bitmap that are black will be printed as black on the paper.
Most users will probably want the image to be inverted. If the image was
color, what prints will depend on how well the application handled converting the image black and white.
Other printing problems
QBASIC
QBASIC saves its
programs in ASCII format, so one way to print a program is to just print
the .BAS file as an ASCII text file.
- To print the output of a program,
run WLPT1ON before starting QBASIC.
- Make QBASIC full screen if it is not
already. From QBASIC, load and run the program and use
<SHIFT>+<PRINTSCREEN> .
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If the user has more than a single screenful they need to print, have them
change all of their PRINT statements to LPRINT statements. LPRINT works
exactly like PRINT except it sends data to the printer not the screen.
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You can also print the program listing from within QBASIC using the print
item under the File menu.
- Finish up by exiting to DOS and running WLPT1OFF.
Paradox for DOS
The only way we know of to print from Paradox for DOS is to print ASCII
text to a file and then send the ASCII text file to the printer. Paradox
apparently only supports ASCII text output.
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