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Powerfull generic TEXT ONLY printer driver alternative for Windows 9x/2000 ?

1ST1

1ST1

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near frankfurt/m, germany
Hello, I have connected a professional daisywheel printing based Office Typewriter (Olivetti ET 2300 with LCU2000P paralleport interface) to my Windows 2000 PC (it can also boot into 98SE). Basically I can print on it using the WIndows Text Only printer driver. But the typewriter can not print german Umlaut äöüßÄÖÜ and a few other characters correctly out of NOTEPAD (EDITOR). When I open a dosbox and

type äöüßÄÖÜ > LPT1:

Then it's fine. But not from Notepad, there I get "|" for the characters the typewriter does not understand. In the text only driver there is a font setting where I can select different codepages and so, but from notepad this makes no difference. Currently codepage 437 is selected there.

I don't know, if that is possible to solve with the standard printer driver, if yes, do you have a tipp how this could be done?

Otherwise, is there a more powerfull text only printer driver alternative where I can set up some ASCII conversions and so?
 
Windows uses either Unicode or ANSI for the text internally. Depending on API version, there should be a conversion function between the Windows character set and the character set used in DOS. Look for AnsitoOem and UnicodetoAnsi which can in turn be passed to AnsitoOem. There are other character set conversion routines as well.

You could write or use a notepad clone that automatically converts output into OEM for printing or create a printer driver which does the conversion.

If your typewriter is new enough, it might support the Windows ANSI character set which could make life even easier.
 
Did you try wordpad instead of notepad? It could be that notepad is the limiting factor and not the printer driver.
There is something known as a DDK for both the NT-based windows as well as the DOS-based 9x. Write your own drivers.
Click to expand...
Since you brought this up, is there a download link?
Windows uses either Unicode or ANSI for the text internally.
Click to expand...
Hmmm. Isn't it actually UCS16?
 
bakemono said:
Did you try wordpad instead of notepad? It could be that notepad is the limiting factor and not the printer driver.

Since you brought this up, is there a download link?

Hmmm. Isn't it actually UCS16?
Click to expand...

Microsoft refers to it as UTF16 but the Unicode functions are supposed to handle many other variations of Unicode.

Wordperfect for Windows used to have a set of conversions between code pages to allow use of Wordperfect for DOS printer drivers. I am not too familiar with how it works but that would be my choice for testing early text mode printers.

The current driver kit is now called the WDK. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/download-the-wdk for Windows 10 and https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11800 for XP to 7. Older versions of the DDK can be found with a little searching.
 
I could fix that, I found that if I select code page 850 Latin, then I get more, not all, correct charactres with the Win 2k text only driver. Funny to print today website on a 30 years old electronic typewriter... But now, after testing and comparing a bit arround, I konw these typewriters understand Xerox Diablo 630 ESC sequences. I would love to have a Diabolo 630 driver for Windows, 9x, 2k and even 10. I already I searched the Internet up and down and found nothing...
 
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