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From: taylorj@yvax.byu.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: TurboPascal printer problem...
Message-ID: <574taylorj@yvax.byu.edu>
Date: 18 Apr 89 04:13:49 GMT
Lines: 22

You actually have two solutions to this problem:

1) (easy) call interrupt 17H and find out the printer status (out of paper,
offline, etc.)  I strongly recommend that you not use the method that was
posted  (from Germany), as it reads hardware directly and may not work on all
computers.  I have some example code I can send if you'd like.

2) (hard) send out each character one at a time, checking the printer status
first.

If you use the first method to check before you start printing, or after each
line, you may catch some errors, but you can still get hung up if any printer
problems occur while the line is being sent to the printer.  The second method
is the only way to guarantee that you will not hang up (or at least allow the
user to abort the printing at any time).

Jim Taylor
Microcomputer Support for Curriculum
101 HRCB, Brigham Young University     |   BITNET: taylorj@byuvax.bitnet
Provo, UT  84602                       |   INTERNET: taylorj@yvax.byu.edu




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