Printing from WordPerfect 5.1, VP/ix, Esix

[Bill Campbell]

In <1990Nov22.034419.28778 at pegasus.com> richard at pegasus.com (Richard Foulk) writes:

:>  [...]             Go into the printer menu Shift F7.  Now edit the
:>printer that you are using so that it prints to a file.  On my system
:>D:\text\output.prn.  Now when you print something it goes to this file.  If you
:>print something else it will overwrite it.  A small (LARGE??) inconvience.
:>After it is done printing, I copy the output file to /dev/lp1 and it works
:>great.

:Why not make output.prn be a named pipe on the Unix side (mknod output.prn p).
:And then use a simple script to connect to the spooler:

:	while :
:	do
:		cat .../output.prn | lp
:	done

:I'm not sure if that will work with Wordperfect, but it worked on a simple
:test that I just tried.  Fixes the overwrite problem.

This should work, but with one caveat.  Once DOS programs start
to write, they don't close the file!  This means you have to have
a timer in the program that reads the named pipe that will close
the output to lp when nothing has come over the pipe for a while.

This is the same problem that makes it so much fun to have a
reliable print spooler on a LAN.

:-- 
:Richard Foulk		richard at pegasus.com
-- 
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