 Number 197 - October 1999 |
| Print Without A Printer? | ||
| By Larry Piper, Saginaw Valley Computer Association | ||
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It's quarter to three, there's no one in the place except ...(with apologies to Frank Sinatra)
Your printer is malfunctioning, but you need something printed. You have access to another printer, but its is located on another PC. What to do? Well, there are three steps: (1) print to a file (on a floppy), (2) hand carry the floppy to a second computer, and (3) then print on the second computer's printer. (This article assumes that the software for the item to be printed is only available on the first computer.) This is all fine in theory. I had the necessity to carry out these three steps, and I wanted to pass along my experiences. We all know or have heard that one can print to a file. We just seldom have a reason to do it. For purposes of discussion, lets say you have PC#1 with malfunctioning printer PR#1, and you need to print to PR#2 located on PC#2. The print command always brings up some selection choice for default printer type, number of copies, pages, etc. First, you must use as the default printer the printer that is on PC #2, namely PR#2. If the driver is not installed on PC#1, then you must install it. This is not a big deal on WIN 95/98 because almost every imaginable printer driver is included. Otherwise, you will need to have access to the print driver for PR#2. Next, you must check the 'Print to file' box. Then you are asked for a file name and location. |
This leads to the second
step: printing to a floppy so you can physically take the file to
another computer. Choose drive A: and then a file name, but make sure
the extension is .PRN. You may encounter a new problem: your print file
size is greater than 1.44 MB.1 This may require you to
print only a few pages at a time so you end up with multiple floppies. I
suppose you could print to one large .PRN file on your hard drive and
then electronically transmit this to PC#2 (another whole topic).
Now comes the tricky part. You are now sitting at PC#2 with a floppy disk containing a file, say, PANIC.PRN. How do you 'print' this file? I could not find an application that would open PRN files. The secret is the command: COPY PANIC.PRN LPT1. While you could issue this command in DOS, the PR#2 might not print from DOS. A better way is to use either File Manager in Win 3.1 or Explorer in WIN 95/98.2 Highlight the file PANIC.PRN, click on the copy command from the menu bar, and then add LPT1 as the destination. Confirm that, yes, you indeed want to copy to LPT1. Sit back, watch PR#2 churn out your masterpiece, and pat yourself on the back. 1 I had a one page Word document take 89K as a PRN file; when I left in a graphic, the file size was 703K. Lesson: you can get 15-18 pages of text on a floppy, but probably only 1-2 pages if graphics are involved.
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Number 197 - October 1999
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