I found something that may work: winprint
this,
and also this
Otherwise the only hope is shopping for parallel printers.
and as far as printers are concerned, it's a well-known fact that most manufacturers sell you the device at a loss and keeps the profit margin on ink a bit higher. Modern printers aren't better. I know quire a few people that replace (i.e. sell on Ebay) the printer after the cartridges it was bought with are empty.
Actually I think its to protect the investment you have in that old possibly very expensive legacy program. If the software will only print to a physical parallel port what are you going to do.
On the other side of the coin. The one thing that dot matrix printers excel at is printing to preprinted forms, like shipping orders etc. If you have a multi copy form with carbon paper, the only way to print to it and have it print on all the copies is with a dot matrix printer. Thats likely the main reason why they are still around. Its all about speed. It only adds whats needed to the form and doesn't have to print 2 or 3 or more copies.
Have you looked for printers that still have a centronics/parallel connector? I just gave away an old Brother laser Printer that my father gave me, and thats all it had. I had to us a USB to Centronics adapter as my PC didn't have a parallel port on it.
Thanks for those links! will definitely check them out. Great find bobafetthotmail.
And yes alphanumeric you're right about the software investment of course. In this particular case, it was a relatively small investment a long time ago. Am checking out USB laser printers with parallel interface, may be able to pick one up cheap from auction sites.
you're more likely to find old printers like the one that died, I doubt anyone in its right mind makes laser printers with a parallel port as well.
I have a happy customer!
Managed to resolve this after much testing and customer is successfuly printing reports from his DOS General Ledger package to his to his USB windows laser printer.
The solution which worked was to install 'winprint' software utility which captures the output from LPT1 and directs it to the windows printer.
He can now print portrait, landscape and double sided and most importantly, ditch his dot-matrix printer! So is very happy.
Once I determined that was the solution, it took me less than 5 mins to install the SW and have it up and running.
Thanks bobafetthotmail for bringing that software to my attention and thanks all who gave input.
Btw. As far as availability of laser printers with parallel interfaces, there are several slightly older Brother printers still around that provide that connectivity.
Who knows, this may help somebody else faced with same issue.
Graham
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