jafo@miranda.UUCP (Sean Reifschneider) (12/09/90)
I must be doing something wrong with printing. I see lots of programs that do printing, and they're relatively fast. The printing routines I write end up taking a long time. Here's what's going on. I have to generate bar codes (33 per page with a 15 character description of each). I was using CODE-MASTER, but that requires you to pass information directly to the printer. My origional solution was to open "LPT1" as a comm device, and write the strings directly to it. We've been able to use these routines under windows 3.00 until recently when we went from Novell 286 to Novell 386. Everything else that I've tried that uses printing works. I must assume that it's the direct writes to LPT1 that are screwing me (since you have to run a program that re-routes the stuff headed to lpt1: to the network printer). I figured that I could use the "PASSTHROUGH" Escape, but for some reason when I use it to send a 20 byte string to the printer, the system just sits there for about 2 minutes until I reset it. Next I thought I'd generate the barcodes in memory as bitmaps and bit-blit them to the printer. I just did a test, and it took 15 minutes to copy a 2400x3000 bitmap to the printer (that's the size of a piece of paper at 300dpi). That is not acceptable at all. So does anyone have any ideas about what's going on? If you do, I'd really appreciate it if you could send me mail on this, as well as posting it... My feed for comp.windows.ms doesn't seem to work very well. And read my next post raving on Microsoft OnLine. Sean -- From the desk of Sean Reifschneider. Isn't Amiga UUCP great? Thanks Matt. uunet.uu.net!ccncsu.colostate.edu!ncuug!miranda!seanr