🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Apr15.151328.5678@bradford.ac.uk> N.J.Watts@bradford.ac.uk (NJ WATTS) writes:
>Dear all,
>   	Is it possible to determine whether or not a printer on the stdprn 
>stream is on-line or not before sending any information to it?  I cannot 
>get around the problem that the operating system cuts in whenever the printer 
>is off-line and leaves an unsightly message in the middle of my applications.

You don't mention which programming language you're using, so I'll stick
to the general solution: INT 17 function 02; see Ralf Brown's interrupt
list or other BIOS references.

Oh what the heck, it's not long:

           mov ah,2
           mov dx,0   (0=LPT1, 1=LPT2, 2=LPT3)
           int 17h

Status comes back in AH.  You want bit 4 (selected) to be a 1 and the
following to be 0: bit 5 (out of paper), 3 (I/O error), 0 (timeout).


-- 
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cleveland, Ohio, USA       brown@ncoast.org
"But this information is only being given on a need-to-know basis."
"I need to know _everything._ How else can I know whether I need to 
know it?"          -- quoted from memory from {Yes, Prime Minister}