On Thursday, 1994-09-22  Craig Wood wrote to ALL about "CA Realizer"
as follows:

CW> Here's my problem, I have an IBM 2391 printer and want to print on
CW> a 2 inch high by 12" wide form using double wide, double height
CW> characters. OKAY... all I have to do is to issue a string of
CW> CHR$(27).... etc. control characters, but CAR translates them as
CW> literals and all I  get is ASCII characters.

Hi Craig,

I doubt if it is Realizer causing you the problems. The real problem
is that you are going through the device driver, which is supposed to
know what type of forms you are using. If you set up the driver with
the appropriate forms information, it should handle the odd-shaped
paper correctly for you without going through all the rigmarole of
generating PPDS (i.e. CHR$(27), etc.) The down side of this is that IBM
does not supply a 12" x 2" forms definition, nor double-height
characters, so even the PM printer setup options would probably not
work for you.

To get this PPDS directly to the printer, you can use (at least from
compiler languages like C/C++, COBOL and PL/I, also from assembler) the
Spl...() API calls and bypass the presentation phase of the printer
driver. I don't know if the latest release of Realizer supports this
though. The version I have (1.0) does not, since it's a Windows-only
product.

There is an alternative way to bypass the presentation driver. That is
to write the PPDS to a file and then drag and drop the file onto the
printer icon; click on the "Printer Specific" button after dropping.

Regards

Dave

 * KWQ/2 1.2g * PL/I: Understatement is the purest form of eloquence.

--- Maximus/2 2.01wb