DOS Application Printing issues

How wide is it trying to print.  I understand what you are trying to do, but unless it was designed to print to wide paper an A4 printer certainly would only have had maybe 160 characters wide.  In notepad on my 22" monitor at 8pt Courier new I can get 220 characters wide... I say courier because I assume the output will be line up so needs to be a fixed pitch one.

Are you jsut trying to read this on the screen, or to print it out again afterwards?  I wonder if changing the paper size to A3 in the generic print driver (advanced buton under pritner preferences) might give you enough cpl?

Can you post a sample text file of what it is producing at all?
Steve

What I am getting at is the printer driver may be wrapping the text at the end of it's A4 lines...

Hmm, I've just sent a 250 character wide text file to lpt1: mapped to a generic printer printing to file.... and the text file that came out of the generic printer is exactly the same as the text I sent with no wrapping etc... and that was with it set to A4.

That was just by sharing the generic text printer and then net use lpt1: \\pcname\genericshare mind not with con2print

@BMKESHAV
Generic/Text only is a printer driver in Windows that allows you to print to a file. It is not a physical printer

@dragon

unfortuately I'm not allowed to post a sample of the text file as its confidential company information.

on our old system it used to print on A4 and be very squished, like a narrow font?
the output needs to go into a document (most likely printed) to go to the top boss in the company.
The old printer was just a standard Canon printer but it was in place for so long the guy who set it up is long gone and forgotten so I can't even draw on him.

when I try mapping lpt1 to a shared generic/text only printer the application tells me that the printer isn't ready

@Phreakwently :
If your output is being sent to file first and col.width is >A4 size, then there is two methods to get proper printout :
1) Arrange a Dot-Matrix Printer of 132 Col. (B/c these type of text files is being desigend for these printers)
or
2) Modify (Change the font size of your text file/adjust col. manually in any word processr/spread sheet, its depends on format of your file)

As i think option 1) is permanent solution.

Bm keshav

for point 1, do you mean a physical printer? if so, thats out of the question

if not, how do you propose i configure my printers for that?

Yes, Physical printer.
If you are unable to procure a printer try to do as advised in option 2.
B/c u are not showing your text file ( how can i guess the format of the text file) and until i don't know the format i am unable to provide you any solution. If you cann't put your original text file, put a sample/dummy with exact format.

Bm keshav

well the output is text and putting a sample up isn't an option since its confidential output.

The output at the moment is an RTF using PRN2FILE and using a shared generic/text printer isn't working

If you can't supply us with information to look at it is difficult to help you unless you are prepared to look at the files yourself.  What I am trying to identify is in the file whether it already has carriage return/line feeds in at a certain point across in the output for instance or whether there are other codes in there.

I'm sure it wouldn't take much to take half a dozen lines of the output in Notepad and remove anything incrimentating and post.  My email address is in my profile (click dragon-it link above) if you prefer to send direct rather than post publically... I assure you would not go anywhere dodgy!

For A4 landscape laser output if the app was designed for that (and I was doing so from DOS apps around 18 years ago... you could get 132 or160 characters across depending upon the mode chosen. Some printers could do, I think, 220.  This was sending raw text to the printers though and I imagine what is happening here is you are capturing the data using the generic printer and then opening it in a windows app and using that to print?  

Once you have the raw text file it would be perfectly possible to load it into Notepad and ajust printer settings there or just add PCL codes, say, to control a printer to put into Landscape small fonts mode etc. if you did want to print.  Without seeing the output you are getting or knowing what you are viewing this in it is a trifle difficult.

Another possible option is to use pdfcreator.  You can setup pdfcreator on a pc (it is possible to put it on a server as a service but for this purpose on a normal PC), share it and therefore connect lpt1: to it as you are at the moment.  You can configure that to AutoSave as PDF or one of many other fonts.

Where are you in the world btw?

Steve

I'm in Sydney.

email sent to you dragon.

I had tried mapping cutepdf to lpt1 but that was a failure.
Is PDFcreator the name of the application you're suggesting?

yes that is a free app that will produce pdf or various other fomats from print output.  Have got your email and will look later...

Yeah i'll definately give that a try at work tomorrow - will let you know