I am guessing from your question what you are trying to print from a
dos apllication to a USB printer under Windows XP.
To do this you will have to map the printer in windows to an LPT port
(A port what DOS programs can use).
You can do this in two ways:
1) You can connect the printer to another computer, share it on the
network and map it to the computer with DOS as an LTP printer.
2) You can map your local printer, as if via the network, to the same
computer. This is somewhat dificult because Windows XP prevents you in
some ways to map your own shares.
The first step is to install the USB printer normally into Windows.
Once the printer is installed and the obligatory test pages print
correctly, proceed to the following steps.
Assign the printer a shared name. Generally this happens during
installation, but if you skipped that step or somehow installed the
printer without giving it a resource name, do that now.
Share names (resource names) should be alphanumeric (the first letter
must be an alphabetic character). Even though share names can contain
spaces, I recommend not putting spaces in resource names. The reason
is because it's more difficult to use operating system commands when
spaces exist in the resource name:
net view \\my_computer_name
If the network administrator for your system insists on names with
embedded spaces, here's a way to do it:
net view \\"my computer name"
Next, pick an unused LPT port.
At the operating system prompt, enter the following command:
net use LPT1 \\computer_name\HP /Persistent:Yes
where:
LPT1 is the name of the printer port. Note that a colon (:) does not
appear after the port name on the command line.
\\my_computer_name is the resource name of the computer that is
attached to the USB printer.
HP is the resource name of the USB printer assigned in step 1.
/Persistent:Yes denotes that this connection should be reestablished
when the system is rebooted.
If the command line above is wrapping to two lines then widen your
browser's window because the above command is one command. The above
command line can be inserted into the autoexec.bat or network login
script, whichever is most appropriate for your installation.
To verify that the connection was successful, use this command:
net view \\my_computer_name
**** NOTE ****
You will not be able to see the mapped printer in the configuration
panel when using windows XP, but it is still mapped, try to skip this
step
**************
After the LPT port has been associated with the USB port, open the
printer configuration panel:
Start
Settings
Control Panel
Printers
Right Click on the Printer to display its context menu
Choose Properties from the context menu
Change the data stream from RAW to Text mode. Use these steps:
Choose the Advanced tab or button
Choose the Print Processor button
In the Data Type section, change the data type from RAW to TEXT.
Apply and Close the printer panel.
To test that the printer has been successfully configured, at the
command prompt, execute:
dir > lpt1:
Small directory listings won't have enough information to force a page
to eject, so you might have to repeat this a couple times to get a
page to actually print.
Deleting the Connection (you can just leave it, if you plan to use it after reboot)
To delete the LPT port connection, use the command:
net use LPT1 /Delete |
