Print problems

[rlgaooa]

I have an old FoxPro based program that requires LaserJet II dos print drivers in order to work properly. I have a net use command in place to direct the print jobs to one of the few remaining printers we have that can print these reports. Now I need to redirect this print job to a text file for export. I figured I would just use Adobe Acrobat 6.0, I redirected lpt1 to Adobe and the job starts to print but then displays:

There was an error found when printing the document xxxx to My Documents\*.pdf. Do you want to retry or cancel the job? If I hit retry nothing happens, I end up having to cancel the job. Any ideas?

 

[tgreer]

What is the print stream? PostScript? PCL? What are you re-directing to exactly? The PDFWriter Printer? Distiller?

Thomas D. Greer

http://www.tgreer.com

 

[rlgaooa]

The print stream is out of a DOS based program using hp laserjet II drivers. If I were to guess it is PCL. I am redirecting to the default file location when you select Adobe PDF as the printer. The job starts to execute, and then hangs at about 400kb. Hope this helps.

 

[tgreer]

How are you redirecting? The old DOS MODE command or what? When the job starts to execute... well, how do you know it starts to execute? I.E. does Distiller show up? What appears in the Distiller window? Does it leave a log file behind?

Thomas D. Greer

http://www.tgreer.com

 

[rlgaooa]

The job is hard coded to print to lpt 1. I use the DOS command net use lpt1 \\machine name\shared printer name /persistent:yes to re-direct the job to the Adobe PDF "printer" that I have shared and made my default printer. I them open the print que for the Adobe PDF and I can see the job start to spool, when it reaches 400kb or so I get the error message I mentioned in my eoriler message.
Where would the log file be?

 

[tgreer]

Hmmm. Could you post a link to one of your print jobs? I'd like to take a look at it.

Thomas D. Greer

http://www.tgreer.com

 

[rlgaooa]

Now you've got me, I haven't the faintest clue as to how to post a link to the print job. It is buried within the overall legacy program that was written before I could even type. Perhaps if I could figure out the appropriate net use command to re-direct this print job to a text file, then I could convert that into a pdf file.

 

[tgreer]

What I suspect is that the print stream isn't something Adobe recognizes. It's just a suspicion; you have a very unusual setup! I thought if I could look at what your program was actually sending to the printer, I could see if it was valid PCL or PostScript, and we could take things from there.

Sorry, I'm out of suggestions at this point.

Thomas D. Greer

http://www.tgreer.com

 

[rlgaooa]

As long as the printer can accept laserjet II drivers then the job can print. We are using HP printers with dos print drivers and PCL drivers and they seem to work.