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I like lots of people need to print text ONLY to a dot matrix printer.

I have run the example found here.

And It seems to work but only XP it does not seem to work on Wnidows 7.

I have tested using a generic/Text only printo to file driver as I won't have acces to my printer for a couple of dyas. On XP it asks me for a file name and then creates a file successfully. On windows 7 the file gets stuck in the print queue which when you view it just says print-error. I know the generic printer driver works on win7 beacuse I can print to it from my text editor.

The short term solution is to use a direct connection to the LPT port,Ive not tested this yet, but the final project will running on a machine that has no LPT port. In fact we are shortly going to evaluate a new epson that will connect using USB, so LPT is out of the question.

Before anyone sugessts using graphics, they should know that this is an event logging application that needs to print immediatley one line at a time. It cannot wait for a page of text to be ready before printing.

tshepang
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Simon Rees
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  • I created a virtual machine with windows xp and created little server that prints from network to the printer.. not the best solution, but it works – Andrew Feb 28 '13 at 00:01
  • http://superuser.com/questions/104536/are-there-any-epson-dot-matrix-printers-that-support-windows-7-64-bit – Jeremy Thompson Feb 28 '13 at 00:06
  • You can bypass the [spooler and talk to the printer directly](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322091). – Hans Passant Feb 28 '13 at 00:45
  • Try defining a printer share, then send the text to the share. `\\127.0.0.1\sharename` You can test it by making a text file, then copy the file to the share. (no programming required) `copy test.txt \\127.0.0.1\sharename` If the printer is a simple dot matrix printer, it should print as text – Fred F Feb 28 '13 at 01:10
  • I created a share of the generic driver on the XP machine and it worked with my test App running on win 7. Interestingly the file dialogue appeared on the xp machine not the win 7 one. – Simon Rees Feb 28 '13 at 11:00
  • Since yesterday I have aquired a dot matrix printer to test with. An epson LX80. The Microsoft example code seems to work perfectly with it even on windows 7. However generic printer driver still reports an error so I am not sure what is going on. This solution is an OK one for the time being as I can now print across a network but will the win32 api still work when I have to move to window 8 and beyond. I really neet a .NET solution and not have to pull in aload of win32 ddl references. – Simon Rees Mar 01 '13 at 20:25

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