🚀 go-pugleaf

Brian {Hamilton Kelly} (bhk@dsl.co.uk) wrote:
> [Note cross-post and follow-ups]

????

> When running SNews, one can press "o" (lower-case Oh) to print the
> current article (or thread, if used at the group "menu" level).  This
> printing *always* takes place to PRN (indeed, if one has printed
> something, and later uses "s" to save to a file, when one is asked to
> enter the name of the file, the last "file" used is shown as "prn").
> 
> Printing *always* takes place to the PRN device, which is irretrievably
> associated with physical device LPT1: (so far as I can see; there doesn't
> seem to be anything to associate PRN with a different device, unless that
> happens to be on a serial COM port).

Do I not recall a distant memory of 'mode prn:=lpt2:' (or similar) ?

> My girlfriend uses SNews in a DOS box under Win'95 on her machine which
> is networked to my OS/2 system (which holds the newsbase, etc).  However,
> she is constrained to printing on LPT1 by the apparent design of SNews,
> whereas she would *like* to print to "LPT2", which doesn't really exist,
> being a network printer on my machine.  Pressing "o" always activates the
> printer physically on LPT1, even when the network printer on pseudo-
> interface LPT2 has been selected as Windoze's "Default Printer" (although
> it certainly then becomes the default for anything printed from within a
> *Windows* program).

Windows DOS box == all bets off. :)

> Under SNews we have experimented with using the "s" command, then
> selecting "lpt2" (both with and without a trailing colon) as the output
> "file", but it reports inability to open said file, and doesn't print.

Wild question - have you tried \dev\lpt2 ?

I guess it will not work as I suspect it is using the Borland
per-opend file handle for prn. (ID 3 ?)

> Does anyone have any ideas about how SNews could be rewritten to be a
> little more flexible about its printer (perhaps adding a "print" category
> to the resource file, like PCElm)?  More to the point, has anyone already
> done this, and got an executable I can use? :-))

I used to have a small DOS utility that swapped lpt1 and lpt2 that
would do the trick. It is probably still on the ftp site. Unless
someone beats me I will look up the name next time I run DOS. It
was something like 'lptswap'.

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