Adding "signature" to all printouts on dot matrix text only printer

[Raydr]

Hello,

I have a Microline 320 Turbo printer.

It is installed on a W2K box as Generic/Text Only.

The printer is used to print 200 work orders a day for our field technicians.

The work orders that print only have the basic job information.

I need a tech and customer signature line on every work order. The software used to print work orders CANNOT be modified.

Basically, what I do now is I'll run a ream of three part paper through the printer and print the "Customer Signature" line on every work order. Then, when it's done, I refeed it through and print out the actual work orders.

This is very time consuming, especially when a ream of paper is 1100 sheets.

My question is:

Is there a way to have the the drivers always print this information? Kind of like what notepad does when you print something with "Untitled" at the top and "Page n" at the bottom.

This would have to be done at driver level probably. Any thoughts?

 

[HamishZA]

How much would it cost to get that pre-printed?

You obviously checked the options in the driver screens like I just did- nothing there as far as I can see.

Do you have some s/w expertise in house? One thing you could think about is to print-to-file, then have a home-grown program read that file in, and everytime it sees a carriage-return (hex 0c) add the lines you need, writing a new print stream.

 

[HamishZA]

Or.... how about printing-to-file as I suggested above, then open the file in Word and print from there with your sig set up as a footer?

 

[HamishZA]

sorry, not carriage-return.... I meant a form-feed 0c of course!

 

[Raydr]

Hamish, AWESOME idea. I have NO idea why I didn't think of it before!

This would be VERY easy to do. You win.

 

[Raydr]

Okay, just thinking more in depth here:

I can easily write the app to process the "printed" file and reprint it with the footer.

Any idea on how to "create" a printer that actually prints to my software app? A virtual printer, basically. When they print the work orders, they can print it to my application, and then I can just redirect the modified text to the proper printer.

Basically, I now would LIKE to write an app like Adobe's PDF file creator, where you just "print" to a PDF..know what I'm saying?

 

[HamishZA]

Glad to help.

Not sure how to link the apps as you would like, but an alternative might be for you to have your new app monitor a folder all the time. When the old app creates the print file (which you could do by setting the printer's port to FILE your new app would see it and kick in. Something like that anyway