Printing from Emulators

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RWAP
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Printing from Emulators

Post by RWAP »

A quick guide is needed for printing from emulators - it is not obvious, but the unregistered q-emulator does not have printing facilities - once you upgrade to the full version, you can send output to ser1 as on the standard QL, and it will capture this and try to output it to a connected WIndows driver.

QPC2 on the other hand can output directly to the serial or parallel ports. However, if you only have a windows based printer, and not one which will handle plain text or epson ESC/p2 codes (for example), then you need to buy and install QPCPrint which will capture the output and convert it.

Anyone fancy writing a short step by step guide?


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M68008
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Re: Printing from Emulators

Post by M68008 »

The registered Q-emulator for Windows can also output directly to the serial or parallel ports. This can be used for example to connect to QL printers, a real QL, a mouse or a modem.

What it doesn't currently do is to redirect the raw stream from the SER device to a USB port, so if you connect the printer to the PC through USB (rather than COM or LPT ports) to print to it you should use the printer emulation, whether the printer supports ESC/P2 or not.

To use printer emulation, make sure it's enabled in the QL Configuration window (available from the QL menu when QL emulation is stopped), redirecting SER1 and SER2 to 'Printer' in this window.
Once this is done, an easy way to test whether it's working is to send some text to the printer directly from SuperBASIC:

Code: Select all

OPEN#3,SER
PRINT#3,"Hello Printer"
CLOSE#3
To print from QL programs like Quill, they may need to be configured to use printer codes compatible with the old Epson printers.

Printer emulation is not currently available on OS X as the OS printing APIs work very differently than on Windows.


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tofro
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Re: Printing from Emulators

Post by tofro »

Hi!

what should be kept in mind is that QPCPrint, although it was originally (I at least think so) intended to work together with QPC2, can easily be made to re-direct anything that goes to a "legacy" DOS port & printer to the Windows standard printer.

I use it when I want to print from old DOS XChange to my Windows-Connected standard printer which is a network-connected laser - I have not tried it, but would assume QPCPrint would also be a nice addition to QEmulator.

Regards,
Tobias


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