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if printing direct to printer, all the extended properties of printer setup dialog will work, f.e. stapling, scaling to 50 % or make a watermark on the document. they are very important for the printer finisher to work as expected.

But if I first print to file and then copy the file to printer, all the extended properties are lost on HP Laserjet (PCL).

To reproduce this, I simulated this also in Delphi with a very simple code. After normal printing to printer worked as expected, I only changed lpszOutput in DocInfo to "...\test.prn" (not more!) and the prn-file has been generated. Then I opened the file in binary mode and wrote it to same printer ("StartDocPrinter","WritePrinter","EndDocPrinter"). And then the document has been printed correct, but all the settings in extended properties are lost, no scaling, no watermark..

I thought, the printer should get exactly the same binary data stream, but please what can be the reason, that obviously the driver writes different content to prn file and different to printer? or are there some flags or commands, which I must set by code? is it an HP specific problem? thank's in advance.

minimix
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1 Answers1

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Are you calling PrintDlgEx or PageSetupDlg in both cases?

The properties are in the print job's DEVMODE structure which the driver uses when rendering the job. It sounds like your DEVMODE isn't being set up correctly or is being ignored when you set lpszOutput. The behaviour you're seeing is very similar to that when you uncheck a printer's "Enable advanced printing features" checkbox.

There's some info on using the print dialog with lpszOutput here.

Nick Westgate
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