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P5MSC007.TIP
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If you don't own a good graphics printer but have access to
one elsewhere (say, at a local copy shop), Windows provides
a nifty, little-known way to take your formatted document,
on a floppy, to another computer for printing. The other
computer doesn't need to have your application or even
Windows.
First, set up a printer driver that will send its output to
a file: Select Printers from the Control Panel's window,
then select Add; a list of printers will appear. Select the
model that will be printing the document (not the one, if
any, attached to your computer), then select Install. Follow
the prompts for installing the printer driver from the
Windows setup disks. Once your new printer is in the
Installed Printers list, highlight it and select Connect.
Scroll down through the resulting list of ports to select
FILE:. Exit the Printers window and the Control Panel.
Now, every time you use File·Print Setup to select your
nonexistent printer, and then print from any Windows
application, Windows will first ask for a file name. Once
you've given it, Windows will send all the control codes and
data to the file just as if it were a printer. To print your
document, take the output file on a floppy to the computer
with the printer. Print with a simple command from the DOS
prompt: COPY /B A:filename LPT1:. The /B switch makes sure
that binary control codes are preserved. You may need to
replace LPT1: with another port address and A: with another
floppy drive letter.
This procedure has a few limitations. First, make sure you
stick to fonts that are in the printer. If you use Adobe
Type Manager, make sure that ATM's 'Use Pre-built or
Resident Bitmap Fonts' option is turned off. Second, you may
find that your Windows output file is larger than the floppy
can hold. Most Windows applications allow you to select a
range of pages to be printed, so you can easily create a
number of smaller output files if the entire document would
overflow the disk.
Steven Fox
Chung Ho City, Taipei Hsien, Taiwan
Editor's Note: You'd have to print a very large file to
overflow a floppy, but if you do encounter this problem,
here's another way to handle it. Because printer control
codes contain a great deal of redundancy, compressing a
print file with PKZIP (or any other compression utility)
will reduce the size by as much as 80 percent, letting you
get up to five times the output on a single floppy. You can
then use PKUNZIP's -C (Console) switch to direct the output
to the printer as the file is decompressed: The command
PKUNZIP -C zipfile.ZIP > LPT1: will unzip a file directly to
your printer.
Title: Printing via Sneakernet
Category: MSC
Issue Date: August, 1992
Editor: Brett Glass
Supplementary Files: None
Filename: P5MSC007.TIP