Celestial Software

The Z31 is what is knows as a 'WinPrinter' which means that it has almost no brains of its own and relies on Windows for just about every aspect of printing. The printer basically only knows how to print bitmapped images, so when text data comes along, windows has to build bitmapped images of the printed pages to ship to the printer (resulting in larger size print jobs when printing seemingly small amounts) A normal printer that is *not* a WinPrinter will pretty much print any text that comes its way.

For some reason, AbsoluteTelnet is not picking up on this and is still sending data directly to the printer (resulting in small job sizes for Absolute). It seems to be doing this regardlesss of the status of the 'print direct to printer' flag, which is *supposed* to control whether or not data is processed by Windows or sent directly to the printer. Text data that is sent directly to a WinPrinter will be ignored, resulting in the problem you describe.

I'll work on this and let you know what I find. However, even with a fix, 'print direct to printer' should certainly be disabled for this printer.

Brian

Beth, I've got a first swag at this which you can download from the beta test page....

http://www.celestialsoftware.net/telnet/beta_software.html

The version number is 2.11 RC10, even though the text on the web page hasn't been updated to reflect this.

This version *should* correctly print text on your Z31 (or any winprinter for that matter) as it takes an approach similar to the print screen/selection in order to render the printed data. The 'direct to printer' flag will still send raw data directly to your printer, so this option should be *disabled*.

Remaining work for this option includes choice of printer font/point size and support for international character sets and character set translation.

Success!!!

Thank-you. As this is a beta version would you like me to let you know if I find any problems?

Absolutely!!!

Plus, I'll have a few additional changes to make to the passhtru printing that'll need further testing. I'll keep you posted.