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Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
From: sun@me.utoronto.ca (Andy Sun)
Subject: Re: documentation printing
Message-ID: <91Jun12.041116edt.18586@me.utoronto.ca>
Organization: U of Toronto, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
References: <1991Jun11.105816.31353@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <1991Jun12.041244.9684@uwasa.fi>
Date: 12 Jun 91 08:11:24 GMT

ts@uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi) writes:

>In article <1991Jun11.105816.31353@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> arritt@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>:
>>Is there a good reason for using copy-to-prn rather than 'print'?
>:

>Print invokes a resident program which will stay in memory thus
>reserving some of it (unless you use mark-release).  Whether that is
>of consequence or not is another question depending on your
>configuration and preferences, but that is the technical difference. 

>...................................................................
>Prof. Timo Salmi
>Moderating at garbo.uwasa.fi anonymous ftp archives 128.214.12.37
>School of Business Studies, University of Vaasa, SF-65101, Finland
>Internet: ts@chyde.uwasa.fi Funet: gado::salmi Bitnet: salmi@finfun

Yes and no. DOS PRINT does more than eats up memory. PRINT allows background
spooling and printing. A good reason for not using COPY is if you do not
want to wait till COPY finishes sending to PRN before it returns control to
you. With DOS PRINT, you can queue several files to print and immediately
resume what you are doing. It is "multi-tasking" in a sense (note the quotes).
As far as I know, at least from DOS 3.30 onwards, PRINT allows you to specify
the spooling buffer size, the "foreground/background" job time ratio (again in
quotes, PRINT is a TSR and it's using interrupt, so in fact it should be
called foreground/suspend).

Andy

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Andy Sun                            | Internet: sun@me.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto, Canada       | UUCP    : ...!utai!me!sun
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