Greetings from a wet San Diego and I wish a Happy New Year to all of my readers! This week's blog entry is going to tackle a topic I hear about from time to time here at HP. This is in regards to printing from Microsoft DOS applications on newer USB-connected printers running in a Windows environment. This means most of us in today's printing environment. I will not bore you with all of the technical details on why this is challenging. For those of you who dare to remember (and will admit to it), printers of times past had parallel or proprietary interfaces (like the old HPIB or Greensheet) versus the more common USB interface today. Most printer vendors still provide at least a few printers that have parallel interfaces.Also, DOS printers printed from DOS applications running mostly on DOS OS. So the question is, how do you print DOS applications in Windows with a USB interface?

For those of you that have the issue, PC World ran an article about it some time ago. There is a print utility out there called DOS Printer that claims to be able to print from DOS applications under Windows.

There are plenty of links out there on various configurations, hardware, and software that will help you print from DOS applications with more recent printers running Windows.

I can't claim that any of these will work for any specific printer, but the resources are out there. If you have a way that works for you and would like to share it, please post it to the blog and share your experiences with the rest of us. I would like to hear from you.

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Posted 01-14-2008 3:51 PM by Anonymous