Printing problem from MS-DOS 6.22

C

cepheid

Junior Member
Hi,

I'm running an MS-DOS 6.22 Guest OS with Parallels v4.0.3844 on Mac OS X 10.5.8. I've got everything set up just fine, except for printing. My DOS program prints in plaintext, so if I set the parallel port to "Default Printer," the printer gives me an error, because it is receiving plaintext when it wants a properly encapsulated print command. I tried setting the printer to "Adobe PDF 8.0" and that also gives an error, so clearly my DOS OS is trying to just print plaintext, not sending proper print commands.

If I set the parallel port to an output file, then the output file contains all the plaintext that was supposed to be printed. The output file is easy to read and I can obviously print it that way, but I would much rather have the output sent directly to printer, not to file.

1) How can I get the DOS OS to send proper print commands, instead of sending plaintext?

2) When I set the output to "Default Printer," the print dialog never came up, so I could not specify print options, saving as PDF, etc... it just sent the print job directly into the print queue. How can I get the print dialog to come up instead of sending the job directly to the print queue? I'd prefer to save my files as PDF.

Thanks!
 
Salamat said:
Excuse the probably dumb question, but your printer is connected to a parallel port?
Click to expand...
Macs don't have parallel ports, so no. My printer is a network printer. Parallels is feeding the print output to the printer correctly, but it's sending it plaintext instead of printer commands (either postscript directly, or driver-interpreted postscript converted to raw print commands). In other words, Parallels sees the printer just fine; it sends output to the printer just fine... the problem is that DOS is sending raw plaintext as output, and Parallels isn't converting that to language the printer can understand.

Hope that makes sense.
 
Hi,

To print from DOS you need install any PS (PostScript) driver inside DOS. Parallels Desktop uses postscript protocol to send printer data to any installed printer in the Mac. Thus, there is one requirement and it is a PS driver in guest OS.

Alexander
 
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