On 4/20/2021 8:24 AM, Adam Nielsen via Freedos-user wrote:
I believe you have to install DOS USB drivers first.
It's worse than that. I've tried to get many different printers
working under Linux (which generally has pretty good hardware support)
and it turns out that a lot of manufacturers cut corners on their
devices and don't support standard print protocols like PostScript or
PCL, and instead use a lightweight translation layer to pass the
drawing calls in the Windows API over to the hardware.
It basically means there are a number of (usually cheap) printers out
there that will only work under Windows.
Correct.
So even if you do manage to get USB drivers, chances are slim you can
get it to print. If you can find a modern printer that supports both
PostScript and PCL, there's a fair chance that you can still get a
parallel port interface adapter for it too so you won't need the USB
drivers anyway. They're usually aimed at industrial/point-of-sale type
users where the modern equipment still all uses the traditional
interfaces.
If you are talking laser printers, then that might exclude printers
that are Postscript only, as they require some software on the computer
side to translate plain text into a Postscript data stream that the
printer understands. Not such a big deal for simple text files, I have
written such a tool in the past in less than an afternoon, but it is
still an additional step to be taken, unless you are printing from a DOS
application that by itself is capable of printing in Postscript (AFAIK,
both Word for DOS and WordPerfect for DOS come with Postscript printer
drivers).
A printer that natively understand PCL3 (PCL5 or PCL6 is nowadays not a
sure thing of support anymore, specially on non-HP printers) will
commonly understand plain text and can be used just fine, as long as you
can physically connect it...
Ralf
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