How to redirect LPT1 to PDF printer or OneNote printer
Solution 1
There are sometimes problems redirecting LPT1 if a physical printer port exists on the computer. If that's your case, you could try the following:
- Disable LPT1 in the BIOS (if supported)
- Direct the old DOS program to use LPT2 (if it accepts such parameters) and redirect LPT2 instead
- Use the ancient command
MODE LPT1:=LPT2:
(probably too old to work in Windows 7) and redirect LPT2 instead
You could also try to run in a Command Prompt (cmd) as Administrator the following :
net use lpt1: /delete
net use lpt1: \\{my machine name}\{pdf-printer} /persistent:yes
If nothing works for you, here are a couple of shareware products that supposedly solve the problem (never tried them): DOS Printer, Printfil.
Solution 2
The main problem isn’t redirection. Windows printer drivers can’t handle the ASCII data streams with embedded print codes as sent by a DOS program. A DOS printer will render the data stream to paper. For all other print tasks, you need an external DOS-to-Windows print processor program (more around, even freeware). Or vDos, though that is primary intended to run DOS applications in Windows 64-bit, like most Windows 10 distributions nowadays.
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Jammy Lee
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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Jammy Lee over 1 year
There is a very old foxpro DOS program, which print doc via LPT1 , now user want to have soft copy . So I shared the PDF printer and OneNote printer on my local machine, and tried to map LPT1 to them as below
PDF printer:
net use LPT1: \\{my machine name}\pdf
Printer "Send to OneNote 2013":
net use LPT1: \\{my machine name}\one
Both commands completed successfully, and I can see the task could be added to printer's queue by below command, but nothing actually printed
print /d:LPT1 result.txt => result.txt is currently being printed
Note: I also tried LPT2, LPT3 , but got same result
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Jammy Lee about 7 yearsI also tried LPT2, LPT3 , but got same result , anyway , thanks for your reply, and I'll try the products that you shared
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Jammy Lee almost 7 yearsthanks, would you give some names of "DOS-to-Windows print processor program" ?
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Jos Schaars almost 7 yearsBesides vDos built-in print processor, you can use: DOSPRN, DOSPrinter, WinPrint, and more, just Google. Though those are essentially Epson-only, so your DOS program has to be set to print to an Epson printer.