OpenEuphoria

Re: (confused noob) How do I make the EUINC variable in XP?

• Posted by ChrisBurch2 <crylex at fre?uk.?o.uk> Sep 17, 2007
• 832 views

don cole wrote:
> 
> Uhhh I think we lost that guy.
> 
> Interesting discussion though. 
> 
> With '95, '98, 2000 and XP. when ever I had a problem or some thing happened
> that I didn't 
> understand, I would restart the computer. This usually fixed whatever. Not
> always.
> 
> On that subject I was wondering if anyone could help me.
> 
> What I would like to know is, under XP can anybody run mydata.ex, eprint.ex
> (both in Euphoria
> download/samples) or pbook.ex (in the archives) and get it to print? Or not
> get it to print.
> 
> Is it that the task simply cannot be done under XP?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Don Cole

Hi

My take on this.

Most dos programs will do something like

lpr textfile.txt

or 

copy textfile.txt prn1

or 

open("prn", "w")

or similar, in other words writing directly to the serial or parallell printer
port.

Windows xp won't allow this. It thinks you are an evil or nasty person if
you try to write directly to its hardware, and it wants to control your life
(or at least your printing habits)

Somewhere, and I even think there's a wrapper here, there are hooks within
the windows api, that take your printout, and then send it off to the various
ports,
or even the network now.

I think the trick would be to set your dos program to send its output to a file,
with another windows program to lookout for these files, contantly running,
so that its this helper program that prints the file. It then wipes out your
printed file, ready for the next one.

This program should be writable in eu. I'm not going to do it - I don't need
it. This type of program is also known as a spooler - there may already be
stuff available out there that does this sort of thing.

The problem arises with the dos programs - can you rewrite them to put the
output to a file, or is there an option to 'print' to a file?

Here is what a quick search threw up, which offers some more possibilities.

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&q=dos+printing+in+xp&btnG=Google+Search

Hope this is a helpful pointer. Best of luck.