I've written some perl scripts in the past but I've never printed to a
printer, and I'm having trouble getting this to work. I'd be grateful
for any help you could give me.
What I want to do is print to a receipt printer on the parallel port (or
in some cases a USB port) of a PC running Windows XP or Windows 2000.
Ideally, I'd like to print a scaler or an array to the printer, rather
than printing the contents of a file. Actually, the goal is to print the
price of items on the checkout receipt at the circ desk. Our III system
doesn't provide for this, but I was going to try to intercept the print
job using Alphatronics Port Monitor, send the receipt data to a script
that looked up each barcode and returned its price, and then printed out
the receipt plus the value of what you checked out. Maybe it's not a
practical project; at this point I'm trying to get a feel for whether
this is something I could do.
What I've done: I've installed ActivePerl and nmake on my pc (later I
tried Strawberry Perl). I also tried several things for printing:
1. Tried this code:
open(PRN, "|lp");
print PRN "hello";
result: error message:
'lp' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable
program or batch file.
2. Tried this code:
open( LPT, "> lpt1" ) or die "error opening printer port $!\n";
print LPT "hello";
close(LPT);
result: no error message, but no printing.
3. Tried installing and use the module "Printer" from cpan but it seems
to need Win32::Printer.
4. Tried installing Win32::Printer but it fails the "make".
Is there something else I can do? Maybe a different scripting language
would make it easier to print in Windows.
Phil
--
Phil Shirley
Technology Services Coordinator
Cuyahoga Falls Library
Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio
330-928-2117, ext. 109
pshirley at CuyahogaFallsLibrary dot org
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