Another Win32lib problem, and this may not be fixable. Fixed - sort of....
- Posted by ChrisB (moderator) in August
- 1373 views
Hi
I was away on holiday when the win32lib not working thread appeared, so couldn't really get involved, glad it's more or less sorted.
However when I got back I thought I'd better just check it out to see if there was a problem with the download.
Oh dear, I got the dreaded freeze - flashing console cursor, and stuck on that for ever, needing to close via task manager, with no feedback as to the actual issue.
This usually boils down to a library / dll issue (error in the dll not with eu), and also often because of a wrong parameter.
SO I went down the rabbit hole of tracing the paths through win32lib (puts(1, "Hello(01)", ? parameters, printf(1 "Parameters"< {})) until I tracked it down to printing and w32pool, and the winspool.drv.
I recently updated windows 8.1 (I was one of the minority that loved it) to windows 10 (it's ok, but the computer is 10 years old now, so it occasionally lags). I also got a printer at the same time - so that's 10 years old too, an Epson SX235 - works great, no reason to change it. I re installed drivers for Windows 10, and it seems to work fine, except sometimes it doesn't.
The windows printer driving system has also changed, there's a different style of print dialogue now. Programs designed for win 10 work fine, and bring up the new dialogue, legacy programs just freeze when trying to print, and need to be shut down from task manager.
Getting back to win32lib, the printer and printing seems to be so tied in very intimately to the program, that it's going to be extremely difficult and tedious to tease it out, put it in a aseparate include, and set a flag as whether to include it or not.
As I see it there are a couple of issues here. The print dialogue has changed in Windows so that eu isn't talking to the new style dialogue. The old style dialogue isn't being brought up by eu / win32 lib (winspool.drv). The epson SX235 may have installed a winspool.drv that can't be used by eu / win32 lib / Windows 10. The dll/drv is silently crashing and not letting eu know.
Other eu programs work fine. I fact non printing win32lib programs that I made on win 8.1, and bound, also works fine. Binding removes unused routines and functions, so obviously printing functions have been removed at binding time.
Investigations are ongoing. I may install a modern printer. I will try to tease out the printing entanglement to see if I can flag it on or off.
Has anyone had similar issues, or any thoughts on the way forward
Cheers
Chris
