Printer Problems

alanpollack

I just purchased TB Gold for Windows 10, and tried printing to my HP Officejet printer. I wrote the simplest little test program, following the manual: I opened the channel, printed some text to that channel, closed the channel, then End. The program ran but nothing happened at the printer. There's nothing waiting in its queue either. I'd be grateful for any suggestions.

mcc

Hello alanpollack,

It appears that you ran some code similar to the following, and it did not work:

! ------
option nolet
 set cursor 3,1
 
 DIM a(5)
 OPEN #99: printer
    FOR i=1 to 5
       a(i)=10*i
       print, i; "   "; a(i)
       PRINT #99: a(i)
     NEXT i
CLOSE #99

get key zz
END
! --------

This works on Win7 with Silver 5.33 , Gold 5.5., an OLD version of Bronze v.6, and all earlier versions of TB. Don't know about latest v.6, but there's NOTHING different in the core code any of the TB versions. Same as it was on day one.

Now if the above code won't work, there must be something wrong with

the compatibility of the HP printer with TB (which used to be mentioned occasionally as a problem on the old forum);
the installation process of v.6, or
Win 10 itself.

Hope this helps. Sorry I didn't see your post earlier.

Regards,
Mike C.

alanpollack

mcc

Thanks. I never did get my HP to print from TB. Instead, I saved the would-be printer output to a text file, which I then opened in and printed from Word. It worked well enough for my particular need.

mcc

hello, alanpollack,
I do essentially the same thing, even though TB will cause the output to print on the printer I have. I find I save a lot of paper this way.

What I do, is just put code into the program to "save" or "save-as" the output to a pre-named filename in a directory that is also created by the program. Or if I need the results to be at hand immediately, I just put code into the program to put the output on the system clipboard and then paste it into a text editor. (I find that a regular text editor loads quicker and works better for me than MS Word or Open Office. I also use the text editor for writing my programs ). Then if I need a hard copy, the text editor can print it, as you do. Depending on what's being attempted, sometimes I both save and paste.

In a lot of cases, there will be several other programs that want to use the data so saved, so in that case I have the generating program automatically save to a pre-named file tucked away in C:windows\temp; then the other programs needing the data automatically know where the data file is and can automatically open it and use the data.

I have Libraries with SUBs to take care of all this so composing a new program doesn't get all wrapped around the axle of doing all this stuff each time.

Regards,
Mike C.

alanpollack

Thanks, Mike, for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully. It's good to know that I haven't missed some easy solution.