Pass through Print (PTP) for Windows Revision 1.00 Copyright 1993 by Gordon Haff and Bit Masons Consulting. All rights reserved. Freeware program. Command: PTP Purpose: Windows makes it extraordinarily difficult to do a simple pass-through printing job. What I mean by this is, say, you have an Encapsulated Postscript File you want to send to a Postscript printer. There's no easy way to do this. Simply printing it to your Postscript printer using normal Windows print commands will definately not work. One alternative is to drop to DOS and use the COPY command, but this is an ugly solution and can be slow besides. PTP sends a file directly to a printer port, bypassing all Windows print services. This is a bit naughty and outside the philosophy of Windows, I suppose, but it gets the job done quickly and easily. Syntax: PTP Prereqs: 100% IBM Compatible PC running DOS 3.0 or higher and Windows 3.1 Archive: PTP100.ZIP New Feature Summary: This is an initial release. ÚÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ¿ ÚÄÄÄÄÄÁÄÄÄ¿ ³ (tm) Äij ³o ³ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ ³ ÚÄÄÄÄÄÁÐÄÄ¿ ³ Association of ³ ³ ³ÄÙ Shareware ÀÄÄij o ³ Professionals ÄÄÄÄÄij º ³ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ ÀÄÄÄÄÐÄÄÄÄÙ MEMBER PTP 1.00 2 DISCLAIMER The author hereby disclaims all warranties relating to these products, whether express or implied, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. The author cannot and will not be liable for any special, incidental, consequential, indirect or similar damages due to loss of data or any other reason, even if the author or an authorized agent has been advised of the possibility of such damages. In no event shall the liability for any damages ever exceed the price paid for the license to use the software, regardless of the form and/or extent of the claim. The user of this program bears all risk as to the quality and performance of the software. LICENSE PTP is distributed as free, copyrighted software. What this means is that you can use these programs for as long as you like without cost or obligation. What you cannot do is to sell this software or make a profit off of it (except as described below) without the express written permission of the author. PTP is the sole property of Gordon Haff. This program may be freely copied and transferred to individual parties. It may be posted on Bulletin Board systems (BBS) for electronic access as long as NO FEE is charged for its distribution except for private BBS operations that charge a regular user subscription fee. Computer information services such as Compuserve (CIS), Genie, and Byte Information Exchange (BIX) are authorized to post this product for subscriber access. ASMPROC may be distributed on diskette only by 1) disk distributors/vendors who are associate members of the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP) or 2) users groups which do not charge more than a nominal fee ($5) to cover the costs of distribution. Any changes to these policies must be made in writing by the author. This software is produced by a member of the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP). The ASP wants to make sure that the shareware principle works for you. If you are unable to resolve a shareware-related problem with an ASP member by contacting the member directly, ASP may be able to help. The ASP Ombudsman can help you resolve a dispute or problem with an ASP member, but does not provide technical support for members' products. Please write to the ASP Ombudsman at 545 Grover Rd., Muskegon, MI 49442-9427 or send a Compuserve message via easyplex to ASP Ombudsman 70007,3536. PTP 1.00 3 TECHNICAL SUPPORT Since this program is a freebie, unlike the shareware programs for which I request a registration fee, I'm not going to make any guarantees here with respect to bug fixes or other technical support. Having said that, I do like my programs to be as bug-free as possible, so feel free to report any problems which you run across. Contact via: Channel 1 BBS (617) 354-8873 Compuserve User ID# 72561,2637 (See Note 1) InterNet/ARPANET 72561.2637@compuserve.com U.S. Mail 3205 Windsor Ridge Dr. Westboro MA 01581 Telephone (508) 898-3321 (after 6pm Eastern time) The above are roughly in order of preference (i.e. how quickly I'm likely to see your message and be able to respond). I check Channel One almost daily and the other electronic services at least weekly in most cases. In addition, I monitor the Interlink and the PCRelay Shareware relays through Channel One. Note 1: When contacting me via Compuserve, please use the Easyplex mail system since I do not regularly monitor any of the IBM SIG message bases. PTP 1.00 4 1.0 Why PTP? ---------------- There frequently comes a time when I need to print Encapsulated Postscript files directly to a Postscript printer under Windows (*). In their infinite wisdom, Microsoft hasn't gotten around to providing an easy way to do this from within Windows. In fact, they haven't provided ANY way which either myself or a lot of other people have ever been able to figure out. You certainly can't just use a Postscript printer driver in the Print Manager or you'll get an Encapsulted (Encapsulated Postscript File) which is almost certainly not what you want. Trying to use a Generic/Text Only driver doesn't seem to work either for some reason. So you start getting clever: "How about copying the file to PRN: from within Windows?" Turns out the smart guys at Microsoft thought of that one -- you can't copy to a hardware device from within Windows. So, the only real alternative seems to be to start up a DOS window and do a COPY from DOS. This is generally a workable, albeit not especially elegant solution. The problem is that for various reasons having to do with PIF file settings and various other things, the print jobs can go rather slowly (even by glacial Postscript printing standards). You may see the "Waiting" light or display on the printer light up a lot and sometimes no amount of fiddling with your DOS PIF file seems to help. I got tired of all this and wrote PTP which solves the problem for me. It may for you as well. (*) I use Postscript as an example throughout this manual since that's what I most commonly use, but all the same principles and issues pertain equally to dumping other formats such as HP directly to their corresponding printer types and PTP will work equally well with any of these other types. PTP 1.00 5 2.0 How does it Work? ------------------------- Just set up PTP like any other Windows program in a Utilities or Accessories Group or wherever else you want to put it. If you don't know how to add programs to Windows, consult the Windows manual or your local Windows guru (who will probably be very annoyed at you for not just looking in the manual). You then startup PTP and are presented with a fairly self-explanatory window. You can type in the filename of the file to print or just use the Browse button which will popup a standard Windows file selection box. You choose the printer you want to go to by clicking on the appropriate LPT port on the right-hand side. Theoretically, PTP should also work with printers attached to COM ports but there aren't too many of these and I had no way of testing, so I just put in LPT (parallel) ports on this go-round. Then hit the Print button. PTP will try to open the specified printer port and will bang characters down the line to the printer as quickly as the printer will accept them. While the print job is progressing, PTP brings up a little Cancel box for the print job. Hit cancel at any time to scrub the job. Depending upon what's going on down in the bits and bytes, PTP may take a few seconds to acknowledge that you've pressed anything. Just be patient. At this point, PTP stops sending stuff out to the printer and returns control to you. The printer may churn on a bit longer but will eventually timeout and go idle. Note that since none of this is going through stndard Windows services, the printer doesn't receive any special abort codes or anything like that; the program just stops sending data. For the techies out there, what PTP specifically does is: o Opens a port with an OpenComm call o Reads a small block from the file o Sends that block character by character with TransmitCommChar, cycling on each character until it gets through o It then reads another block and continues until the entire file is read or the job is cancelled PTP was specifically written and tested to operate with a printer hardwaired to an individual PC either directly or through a mechanical or electronic switch. PTP 1.00 6 4.0 Technical and Acknowledgments. -------------------------------------- PTP 1.00 was developed using Borland C++ 3.1 and the Object Windows (OWL) Application Framework. The development environment was a Dasher 386/25 and a Gateway 2000 486DX2-66 running Workgroup for Windows 3.1 and Windows 3.1 respectively. 5.0 Other Programs by Gordon Haff and Bit Masons Consulting: ----------------------------------------------------------------- Directory Freedom (DF): Offers users a fast, compact alternative to DOS Shells which provides 1) selective file and directory operations; 2) a scrollable environment for examining files and directories; 3) user-defined keys which can operate upon highlighted files (e.g. by defining an editor). All this in a program which takes less than 35KB since it is written in assembler! Easily customized through an external configuration program. A "look- and-feel" similar to PC Mag's DR, but does much more. Now with SmartViewers and many more exciting new features. Shareware: $25 Registration Latest version: 4.60 (DF460.ZIP) the last word: 'the last word' is a quotations trivia game in which 1 to 4 players compete against each other and their own high scores in identifying the source of quotations and completing partial quotes. Most answers are entered free-form and are matched against a set of acceptable responses with a sophisticated pattern-recognition algorithm. 'the last word' runs in text mode -- including on mono displays -- and offers a high level of user configurability. Shareware: $15 Registration Latest version: 1.00 (LWORD100.ZIP) Convert: Unit conversion calculator for Windows 3.1. Comes with a data file containing a large number of common (and not so common) conversions in categories such as length, speed, pressure, volume, and time. The data file is a plain ASCII text file so the user may add or delete units to best fit his individual needs. Shareware: $15 Registration Latest version: 2.0 (CVT200.ZIP) PTP 1.00 7 X-Ray Viewers: The X-Ray Viewers provide a scrollable environment for examining the contents of various types of archive files and allows the user to view those contents by piping them to LIST. In other words, you can read a text file contained within, for example, a .ZIP file without extracting the archive. In combination with the SmartViewer functions in DF, the X-Ray viewers make the examination of .ZIP, .ARJ, .LZH, and .ZOO files almost automatic (just highlight a file and press ). "Freeware" but requires the appropriate archive program and LIST to function. Free, copyrighted software Latest revision: 1.10 (XRAY110.ZIP) Name Date (ND) This program can be set to a user-defined function key and will rename the highlighted file to a new name which is derived from the current date. For example, FILENAME.TXT would be renamed to 891015.TXT if the date were Oct 15, 1989. It appends a letter to the base name (e.g. 891015A.TXT, 891015B.TXT, etc.) if the "dated name" already exists. I find this very useful for handling message-base files from BBS's. Version 2.00 adds a great deal of flexibility with command-line switches. Free, copyrighted software Latest revision: 2.0; Archive name: NAMD200.ZIP (ND200.ZIP on Compuserve) MAKETEST: Command-line utility to create test files. Lets you create any number of test files with user-specified names and sizes. Automatically can add characters to avoid duplicate names. This is an easy way to create something like 100 zero-length files. Handy for users or programmers who want to test a program's capabilities. Free, copyrighted software with QB source Latest version: 1.0 (MKTST100.ZIP) These programs and others (Multi-Edit macros for use with Qmail Deluxe, for example) are available on many fine bulletin boards. The latest releases are always available on Channel One. If you just have to get a copy of one or more of these programs and can't find one, however, I can send them out for a nominal media and postage charge. PTP 1.00 8 6.0 History: --------------- Rev. 1.00 Initial Release