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Reply 120 of 150, by william

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My program currently doesn't redirect printing to a file. You can however in dosbox set the printing output instead of the printer to a postscript file in the dosbox.conf. Later you can send that postcript file to the printer with ghostscript or any program of your choice that translate postcripts language to the printer language .

This is great for printing in linux or other os, however because the printing emulation only support dotmatrix printers that prints black and white the .ps created will not contained color instructions so when you print .ps using ghostscript it will print only black and white, also if you use other output like printoutput=png the image created will be b&w too and not color.
In summary I dont know if you can redirect printing to a file in dos but fizzban printer patch can redirect printing to a .ps, .png file or a bitmap, all of them will print in black and white ..

Reply 121 of 150, by Numberz

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Hi,

Gee, seems that requesting help for printers is taboo here, 🤣.

Aww, what the heck...

I have an old DOS program that I can successfully run on WinXP with DosBox.65 and it even prints correctly!

Well, sort of...

My HP laserjet 1200 doesn't seem to be able to print the entire page of information, as the columns run off to the right.

Does anyone have any ideas to make this work?

This software was developed by my father who passed away 3 years ago and means a lot to me, obsolete or not...

Regards,
Numberz

Reply 133 of 150, by Nazo

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Well, I'm trying to get my aunt able to get WordPerfect 5.1 to run and print correctly. The alternative methods ended up being way too complicated for her (actually they ended up being rather a bit too complicated for me and I never got things 100% working with the alternative methods.) What she needs isn't something that requires her to hit print, minimize WP, fire up an external program, browse to the WP folder, select the output file, and finally print from there. She needs something where she simply hits print in WP and it prints.

So I saw Ykhwong's lovely CVS build and it struck me that DOSBox is better for WP5.1 in Windows than VDMSound anyway, plus that sounds like a great idea. I setup a simple dosbox.conf file that disables all soundcards (I left the PC speaker emulation on so it could beep on errors or something, but, that's it, no disney, no sb, nothing to get in the way or waste resources.) I set it to print using the windows print system and then fired it up to give it a shot. Well, I ran into numerous problems, most of which I guess are basically the same as some that were mentioned earlier (I had tried using a postscript printer driver thinking it was doing more of a translation kind of thing than full emulation.) So, finally I give up and decide to try to ask here even though it's unsupported officially (I tried Ykhwong's page, but, apparently my gender isn't allowed to post, or so it tells me when I hit ok.) Lucky for me I find this thread. Anyway, I get on Corel's site and download a driver for old Epson printers for WP5.1 and install that driver. I select "Epson LQ-850" as was specifically mentioned at some point or other, and then I try printing. Well, first of all, I find that the font still is just as bad as it was even on the DOS text printer driver, and second I find is that even though it KIND of supports bolded text (you have to look twice to even tell it's darker than the normal text though,) it still won't underline (best I got was individual letter underlining -- not whole word -- using the "Standard Printer" driver,) and italics are pretty bad (though usable.) Worse yet though, the font is really bad with spacing (I guess the term I'm looking for here is kerning?) with some letters spaced way too far apart and others so close together it's hard to read for someone like her who has to wear glasses as it is.

As I understand it, you simply replace the truetype font files in the fonts folder, correct? Well, I'm guessing there must be more to it than that because, first, those fonts aren't being used as nearly as I can tell (none of them look like the printed output) and, what's more, I tried replacing all of them with some standard fonts I had and it still made no difference (it's as if it's using some crappy built-in font.)

First of all, is there any hope for things like underlining, bold, and italics? I think she needs those and they aren't optional. Also, if there's no way to fix whatever is going on with the font, then it still won't work. She really really needs this though since she just can't switch to a newer WordPerfect and those alternative methods are a pain in the rear at best (pointless waste of time at the worst.) And yes, I know she really needs to upgrade badly, but, I can't force her and she's just kind of set with a dependancy on this, so I'd like to at least do what I can to ensure that when those ancient (>10 years) Toshiba laptops or the probably equally old laserjet printer finally break, she won't be ruined.

BTW, on a somewhat unrelated matter, is there any way I can disable all those shortcut keys (such as CTRL+F8)? They interfere with WordPerfect shortcut keys. Also, she still has some ancient keyboards specifically for WP which have more function keys, I think all the way up to F20. Any idea what those should be mapped to/from? (Let's just assume for the moment that I did find a way to hook the thing up mind. I'm not even sure her new laptop has a PS/2 plug, and that keyboard predates the PS/2 keyboards even, so I have no idea if it would work at all. Besides, even if there is no way to hook up the old keyboard, the normal shortcuts still need to work without interferance.)

Any ideas on possible solutions are welcome, but bear in mind that she's a lot less computer savvy than I am, so if it involves a ton of steps to do what should be a simple process (such as all the alternative methods I found for printing from WP5.1,) then it's a problem.

(BTW, for anyone who's interested, I found most of my information on drivers/etc at http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/51printers.html)

EDIT: I just realized that with the image output options I could easily attach an image that shows what I'm talking about. Attached is a cutout of the top of the sheet that I printed out in dosbox on the top section (shrunk down to fit on a 1024 display,) and in the bottom section is the font file it is supposed to be using (the others look similar, so I didn't bother to throw in a copy of every font since none look at all like the font on the top.) Note that it's kind of "fuzzier" since it has been shrunk down, but, the original resolution of 3000 something didn't seem very suitable for demonstration. Anyway, as you can see in there, it has letter spacing issues and the underlining is completely nonexistant. I might add that in the original image before I resized down I noticed that the font is pretty grainy with holes and little bits sticking out that shouldn't be (hard to see on paper since it's so small, but, once I looked closely I could see it was there.) That's almost impossible with a truetype font in fact, so it makes me wonder if it's a bitmap font or something.

EDIT2: Second attachment shows an example where bold is all but invisible. I didn't even resize this one down just to leave it as clear as possible. A grand prize goes out to the first person who can correctly guess which word in that sentence I actually bolded. d-:

Attachments

  • Filename
    BadBold.png
    File size
    6.38 KiB
    Downloads
    21 downloads
    File comment
    Demonstrates example of imperceptable bold.
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception
  • Filename
    WeirdFont.png
    File size
    11.53 KiB
    Downloads
    16 downloads
    File comment
    Top part is printout (shrunk down) bottom is font which was supposed to be used.
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

Reply 135 of 150, by Nazo

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DosFreak wrote:

What's the pinout on the keyboard?

Is it this keyboard?

http://www.clickykeyboards.com/index.cfm/fa/i … tid/0/id/131246

No, I think it isn't. First that seems to be German, and second, the buttons on the left don't seem to be function keys. It's also newer than hers. It has a PS/2 style plug even. We're talking about the old kind of plug that uses the huge 5-pin connector that always got loose on you so it could come out at a bad time. This thing is really old and I think made specifically for WordPerfect? It has a set of function keys to the left of the letters, and I think it probably goes up higher than just F20 (maybe as much as F24?) Anyway, you specifically asked for the pinout, so here it is: http://pinouts.ru/Inputs/KeyboardPC5_pinout.shtml (Love that site, through it I have made more than a few adaptors.) The problem isn't the pinout but that I suspect her new laptop may not even have a PS/2 plug on it since there aren't many keyboards left today that don't support USB and they figure you won't need to add on a keyboard anyway. Also, every now and then when they do have a PS/2 plug on the back, they take advantage of the fact that you don't really need every pin to allow you to pug in a PS/2 mouse and a PS/2 keyboard, but, you need a special adaptor to be able to do this since they don't use the same pins (usually they use the same ones for the keyboard just different ones for the mouse, but, for all I know without having ever tried if she has a PS/2 port they elected to do the opposite or to use no standard pins at all.)

Anyway, obviously the keyboard is a much lower priority. If she can't use WP5.1 on that laptop, then there's no point in worrying about shortcut keys being grabbed by DOSBox instead of WP5.1 or whether or not she can use her word perfect keyboard.

EDIT: I figured out how to remove the shortcut keys, so no need to worry about that now.

Reply 137 of 150, by urbantaz

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And that back door is closed in CVS. You can still try some Dosbox build with printer patch i.e. ykhwong's.
DOSBox SVN Builds

is the last one i tried i did the disney=false and used his latest build but alsa no windows dialogue and i tried the png out put and did not see that happen either

Reply 139 of 150, by urbantaz

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ok trying to fix my own problem here but failing miserably. the output seems to go all to the screen and then disappear. I found a trick on another site that say type dir >lpt1 at a command prompt that works. I actually get an output from that. so it seems that dosbox is recognizing the fact that dos2usb is redirecting that port. now just for it printing from the app. I tried changing printeroutput= to someof the other options but no luck. the app just puts all output to the screen real fast and then goes back to it's normal functions. I also notice that once this app starts i cannot exit to a command prompt. the app will hang when trying to exit. besides these things it works fine