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Dot Matrix printer not printing correctly.

Good Morning,

Looking through our storage room yesterday I found an old “OKI MICROLINE 390 Turbo” Printer (24 PIN).

I did a test page from the printer by holding down the LF button for several seconds while I turned the printer on. Results are below, as you can see this printed normally.

I then hooked it up to my machine (Windows 7 32 bit) and used the “OKI MICROLINE 390 TURBO” driver that’s already in windows. It prints but at different times it doesn’t print some words correctly as can be seen in the below screenshot.

I have also tried using the “OKI Generic Dot-Matrix 24Pin Printer” driver, also from Windows and this gives me the same result as the first driver.

What’s interesting though is that when I use either of the above drivers and print a good 10 pages of text on the printer, at first the printer will print incorrectly on the first few pages, but then it will correct itself and print fine, but then will bugger up again, as can be seen below.

I have searched for other drivers on the net, but havent been able to find any. Even the vendor themselves say to use the one in Windows 7.

I've been reading that it could be the printer head that is faulty, but if that were the case then nothing would print perfectly. Also why would the test from the printer itself (holding down the LF button) be perfectly fine if the print head was buggered.

Is someone able to advise what the problem might be? And how it can be resolved.

Kindly advise.

Regards,
N

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Francisco Igor

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Kevin

ASKER

I am developing a Cheque Printing program which will only be printing text, no images nor documents, the output for this can be seen in my second screenshot.

An example of the code I am using to print the output is below.

Private Sub ctrlPrintDoc_PrintPage(sender As System.Object, e As Printing.PrintPageEventArgs) Handles ctrlPrintDoc.PrintPage

        Dim N2WResult As String

        N2WResult = AmountInWords(txtMAmt.Text)

        e.Graphics.DrawString(txtMChqNum.Text, New Font("Courier", 10), Brushes.Black, New Point(100, 100))
        e.Graphics.DrawString(DateTimePickerM.Text, New Font("Courier", 10), Brushes.Black, New Point(100, 250))
        e.Graphics.DrawString(N2WResult, New Font("Courier", 10), Brushes.Black, New Point(100, 300))

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Anyways, I will try your other recommendations and let you know how it goes.

Thanks,
N

Francisco Igor

In your case, you coud try to set the font in your code to some of the printer fonts (eg "Courier 10 cpi") and see the results:

e.Graphics.DrawString(txtMChqNum.Text, New Font("Courier 10 cpi", 10), Brushes.Black, New Point(100, 100))

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Spike99

Is the paper moving smoothly through the printer? Some of that looks almost as if the paper isn't being fed correctly.

This page has instructions for properly aligning paper in the 390 turbo printer:
http://my.okidata.com/idocs2.nsf/alldocsweb/586DE6E538F6589A852569290051C7F0?OpenDocument

Kevin

ASKER

Thank you Fraigor, it's definitely a driver issue. The 'Generic / IBM Graphics 9 pin' driver appears to work correctly, just needs some tuning.

Will play with it.

Kind Regards,
N