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1996-07-14
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~Today's Top Tip
Sending Windows stuff to a text file - By Simon "LuDeCk" Burrows
Those of you with knowledge of Windows and printing will
undoubtedly know that whenever you go to print anything in
Windows, Windows opens its Print Manager for you (if it isn't
open already), and then sends the file which you've selected to
be printed to it. When Print Manager finds your printer to be
idle (ie, on-line and with nothing to print), it prints your
file.
On occasions you may have something capable of being sent to the
print manager (ie, capable of being printed), which instead of
being printed on paper you wish to be sent to a text file so you
can keep it in an electronic format. An example may be an article
in an electronic magazine which you wish to have in a text file
so it can be uploaded, via modem, to a friend. In many situations
when you may want to do this, there is an option in the program
from which the text is coming from to send the text to a file
anyway. Sometimes, however, you will find there isn't, and in
those cases you will have to use my technique which is listed
below in some easy-to-implement bullets...
1. The first thing which you must do is to double-click on
the Print Manager icon to load up Print Manager.
2. Next, pull down the 'options' menu and from that,
select "Printer Setup".
3. From the 'Printer' window, click on the "Connect"
button.
4. Now locate the 'Ports' list, scroll down through this,
and select the "File:" entry.
5. Now close down all windows so you arrive back at the
main Print Manager screen. Now minimize Print Manager
(do NOT close it down completely!).
6. It is now time to load up the program from which the
text to be sent to a file is coming. When this is
done, send the text in question to be printed.
7. At this point, if your program is anything like any
which I have experienced before, a window should now
pop up called "Print to File".
8. Enter the name of the output file which you wish your
text to be sent to in the field provided, and then
press [ENTER].
You should now find your text has been sent to a file of the name
which you specified, and this file should be found in your
\WINDOWS directory. As long as what you sent to be printed was
TEXT, then try loading this file into a DOS text editor such as
MS-DOS edit. It what you get is garbage then it is likely the
file you've got is in a Windows text format, in which case you
should load it into a Windows text editor or Word Processor such
as Write or Word. If this is the case and you want the text as
unformatted DOS text, then use the option found in most Windows
text editors (including Microsoft Word), to send the text to a
DOS file.
I am unsure of whether this will work, but you could try this
trick with graphics. In this way you can rip graphics from a
program which allows you to print them but does not allow you to
send them to a file. The output file which you send the graphics
to should be loaded into a multi-format paint package such as
Paint Shop Pro which should hopefully sort out which format it is
in and display it if possible.
When you have completed the task I recommend you go back into
Print Manager and put the printer setting back to normal so that
future conventional prints work as expected. This is done by
going through the same process as before, but this time choosing
your correct printer port (usually "LPT1") instead of "FILE:".
If you have Windows 95 on your computer then you will have to do
a little experimentation to see whether this technique will work
on that Operating System, because I have no experience of it and
do not know how the printing system (or any other system for
that matter), works.
A WORD OF WARNING
In many occasions where you may wish to use this technique, the
text or graphics which you are ripping is copyrighted and you
will be in danger of BREAKING THE LAW. This technique should only
be used if you are sure that you entirely within your right to do
so.
` ══════════════════════════
~`By Simon "LuDeCk" Burrows
` ══════════════════════════