 BlackbirdBuilt for SpeedPremium
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Fort Wayne, IN
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 ·Frontier Communi..
3 edits | reply to NyQuil Kid
Re: [Need Info] DOS Lotus 123 printing question In the olden days, you ran the 1-2-3 install program and at the initial screen selected "Change Selected Equipment"... this allowed one to access a Change Text Printers selection screen. You then selected for a text printer, and supplied the brand. For compatibility with later-technology printers, selecting HP (OL800 or LaserJet) usually was a good blind choice to make. Depending on the version of 1-2-3, there might not be much listed beyond the old daisy-wheel printer models... in those cases, one selected "Unlisted" and "No Backspace" from the features screen - but support for landscape was sometimes problematic for such cases. After making sure the text printer setup was OK, you then selected Change Graphics Printers and used that to select HP (LaserJetII or Laser Jet+). One then saved the settings changes and exited the install program.
Once 1-2-3 had installed/changed its printer drivers, there were some printing options within 1-2-3 that had to be tweaked via the /Worksheet Gobal Default Printer (/wgdp) command sequence. This is where the printer command string was set up for the particular page settings needed to control the printer, including page orientation. The commands could vary, depending on what printer was being used. A typical command for "current font, landscape orientation" might be \027&l1O (which is backslash, zero, two, seven,'and' symbol, lower-case letter el, one, upper-case letter Oh). Any number of other settings could also be made from within that panel... font, lines/inch, copies to print, etc. When a page print was commanded, 1-2-3 would automatically prefix this settings information in the data sent to the printer.
If things are suddenly not running correctly for landscape print, there could be a problem with the 1-2-3 installed print driver or with one of the printer-command settings within 1-2-3 having become corrupted or erased. One of the habits I got into in the olden days was to simply copy my entire known-good 1-2-3 program file folder into a "safe" folder so that I could simply copy it back over should the settings get trashed. I do this with my Lotus Symphony program (ca. 1985) which I still run under DOSbox in Win7, and Symphony was very similar in many ways to 1-2-3, though not identical. After nearly 30 years, figuring out how to get one of these programs running from scratch can be very challenging... much of the practical information simply isn't out there (such as knowing that the HP Laserjet is the best 1-2-3 printer selection menu choice for modern printers regardless of brands that didn't even exist back then). So... once you get it all running, make a good clean backup copy of the whole 1-2-3 folder for safety's sake - the disk space is almost trivial (my entire Symphony program folder takes up less than 5 Mb)!
Edited to add: There's a very useful page at Okidata: HP Emulation Mode -- Working with Commercial Software that shows how some of this (and a lot more) is done in 1-2-3... I suggest reading it for reference and perspective, even though it applies to an Okidata printer. A question that will need to be answered by your client is whether he wants landscape setting to be a 1-2-3 default, or whether he wants to do that upon demand - and if so, how has he done that in the past?
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"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!" -- P.Henry, 1775 |
