Can a Lexmark Prevail Pro705 print from DOS commands?

[katherine]

Hi
PC is running XP pro
Replaced an old printer with Lexmark Prevail Pro 705.  Shared printer and use net use command to link lpt1 to sharename.  All ok so far.
Print from dos program and get a blank sheet.  Use dir >lpt1 get a blank sheet.  Print from Outlook and get what I expect (words etc!)
Is this because the printer doesn't understand dos print commands - and if so is there a work around that anyone knows (such as 3rd party program required).

Thanks for your help

Katherine

[truenorth]

See if this CH article is of any help. Welcome to the CH forums. http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000199.htm
truenorth

[Salmon Trout]

That page that truenorth linked to is only relevant to character printers. Like old daisywheel and dotmatrix printers. Modern bitmap printers don't work like that. There are various third party programs, the first one off the top of my head is DOSprint. another is Printfil. Unfortunately you have to pay for these.

From the command line or a batch script you can get a number of text editors to start, load a text file, print it to the default Windows printer, and then exit. For example Scite which is free. Or UltraEdit32 which isn't.

Code: [Select]

scite -p filename.txt
Of course scite in that example would have to be replaced by the full path e.g. "C:\Program Files (x86)\Scite (Text Editor)\SciTE.exe" or you could put it in a batch file on your PATH

You have to edit the Global.Properties file to enable/disable things like page headers/footers, line numbers, margins, font, and just about everything you might want to configure. Which is good. And there is loads and loads of web help for Scite which is an extremely good and useful editor.

I have just done these things, and they work.

[BC_Programmer]

That page that truenorth linked to is only relevant to character printers. Like old daisywheel and dotmatrix printers. Modern bitmap printers don't work like that.

dot matrix is a bitmap printer... and that also works with laserjets and so forth.

of course, the main problem is that newer printers don't connect to the printer port to begin with; those that do, wether they be bitmap or character printers, work just fine with the aforementioned print and copy > PRN commands. (some laser printers need you to send a linefeed character to start printing if you output less then a full page, I believe that was ^L (control L) but I'm not sure.

From the command line or a batch script you can get a number of text editors to start, load a text file, print it to the default Windows printer, and then exit. For example Scite which is free. Or UltraEdit32 which isn't.

or, you could use notepad

Code: [Select]

notepad /p filename.txt


[Salmon Trout]

dot matrix is a bitmap printer...

Withe the DOS era ones like the Epson FX-80 etc, in (default) character mode, for each printable ASCII byte you send to LPT1:,  it gets the "bitmap" from its own internal ROM. You have to switch to pin-addressable mode to send a bitmap.

laser printers need you to send a linefeed character to start printing if you output less then a full page, I believe that was ^L (control L)

Yes, ASCII 12 decimal

or, you could use notepad

Can you believe I didn't know that?

[BC_Programmer]

Can you believe I didn't know that?

Now you do! I think it's worked with every version of windows, even (since 3.1, at least). It was even documented in the giant manual I got with windows 3.1. Those were the days, nice thick manuals rather then having to read documentation in a "convenient online format". My eyes often pine for those days. Of course, the flipside of this was that you were able to access the documentation when the OS wasn't booting, which generally was very helpful (since you could find out about f5 to skip autoexec.bat/config.sys and possibly get booted enough to fix the issues). Nowadays, you practically need a second computer to diagnose when the first one isn't booting. (although in all fairness the boot process has become a bit more complicated then it was with DOS, and documentation for it would probably not be very helpful to the average user (who, I might add, has generally gone on the opposite direction as far as average computer competence is concerned).