Lprinting printer control codes?

[arnoldhf]

Thanks for all the input.

Those control codes I gave as examples were, I believe, PCL3 from the time I had my HPIII workhorse. They have continued to work for 25+ years on almost every laser printer I have tried, HP, Brother Lexmark, Canon, Kyocera, etc. even with many "Windows only" printers so I don't think compatibility would be an issue.

In QB64, it appears Lprint can't send chr$(27) to the printer. I have tried printing to a file and then sending the file to the printer and that has worked fine, but, since I have such a large QBasic system (as I said, thousands of Lprint lines scattered throughout) changing all my programs to go first to a file would be very unwieldy. 

Hope I can find a different workaround.

Arnold

I

[Pete]

I very much doubt this would work. It is a statement that is on by default, but can be turned off, as shown below, and when off it allows the characters to be printed to the screen, like chr$(13), chr$(7), etc. So logically this should not make a difference in printing, as you would think it would want to be default (on) when sending chr$(27) as a printer escape code, but as a last resort, it might be worth one try. It just needs to be placed at the top of the program.

_CONTROLCHR OFF

[arnoldhf]

I very much doubt this would work. It is a statement that is on by default, but can be turned off, as shown below, and when off it allows the characters to be printed to the screen, like chr$(13), chr$(7), etc. So logically this should not make a difference in printing, as you would think it would want to be default (on) when sending chr$(27) as a printer escape code, but as a last resort, it might be worth one try. It just needs to be placed at the top of the program.

_CONTROLCHR OFF

You were right. I tried it and no luck.

[arnoldhf]

Hi Guys,

I figured out a (kludgy) workaround. I implemented it in one of my programs and it seems to work (until it doesn't.)

Before I modify all my other programs, I wanted to get your input on possible pitfalls.

At the beginning of the program I open a file, "printer.prn" for Output as file number ff%.

I changed ALL my Lprints to Print #ff%, (something I tried very hard to avoid.)
 
Every time I issue a page feed, Print #ff%, chr$(12), I call this sub:

Sub PrintTheFile
    printfile$ = "printer.prn"
    Close ff%
    Shell _Hide "copy " + printfile$ + " prn"
    Open "O", ff%, printfile$:
End Sub

I probably could have used PRINT instead of COPY. One of the downsides here is that using SHELL copy (or PRINT) sends it out LPT1 so I have to make sure LPT1 is redirected properly.

I found SUBing after each page feed gave me much more control then waiting until the entire job was in the file.

I close the file and reopen it to make sure what I already sent to the printer does not get reprinted.

Any comments would be appreciated.

A