Phil, if you still need a solution to this problem, and to the extent that you're mainly stuck on getting output from Perl to appear on the printer, this is another possible solution:
DOSPrint, a tiny, free (as in beer) utility that assigns an LPT port to any Windows printer (USB, networked, etc.). Described here: http://pcounter.com/index.php?q=free-software/dosprint Download here: http://pcounter.com/index.php?q=downloads/free-software Printing to an LPT port is easy in Perl without any special modules: open (PRINTER, ">", "lpt1:"); print PRINTER "Hello\n"; close PRINTER; This doesn't help with any other aspect of your project (intercepting or manipulating output from Innovative), but it sounded to me like this addresses the part that has you stuck. Good luck, Tom Western Washington University Library -----Original Message----- From: KREYCHE, MICHAEL [mailto:mkrey...@kent.edu] Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2011 7:29 AM To: perl4lib@perl.org Subject: RE: Printing to a Windows receipt printer from a perl script Phil, Have you tried something like this: http://code.activestate.com/lists/perl-win32-users/30503/ I haven't done this myself, just interested in what you're trying! Mike -----Original Message----- From: Phil Shirley [mailto:pshir...@cuyahogafallslibrary.org] Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2011 10:13 AM To: perl4lib@perl.org Subject: Printing to a Windows receipt printer from a perl script 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 -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
