WS7a printing USB?

[lwood]

With WS7a how can I print via USB to a hp officejet 51
10xi ?

Thanks in advance.

Larry

[Forum Admin]

You'll need something like PrintFile from http://www.lerup.com/printfile/ to redirect your printer output to the USB port.

If you don't have suitable drivers you could take a look at Phillip Griffin-Allwood's printing via Adobe Acrobat format at http://www.glinx.com/~grifwood/WordStar.html

[deedee]

Hi Larry,

As Mike notes, if you are working on the MS Windows platform, you will need something like PrintFile, PrintPCL.exe, or a PDF creation program like Adobe's Distiller or Ghostscript to send your output to the USB port.

First, find out if the officejet 5110xi has DOS drivers. If you don't already know this, you may want to go to the HP Support & Drivers site at http://www.hp.com to find out what drivers are available for your officejet.

For detailed instructions on how to redirect output to a USB printer with PrintFile (a free utility for the MS Windows platform), look at the following URL http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/winprint.html#usbprint, probably Method B is the way to go. Although it was written for redirecting WordPerfect DOS output, it works for WordStar output as well.

There is a utility for HP printers called PrintPCL.exe which can be used to redirect output to the USB printer. You would need to create a macro in WordStar to run PrintPCL which would send the file to the USB printer.

Lastly, WordStar comes with postscript (PS) drivers, so there are a number of ways to go using those. PrintFile can be set up to interpret PS files, which can be spooled to any printer.

PS files can be interpreted by Adobe's Distiller, Ghostscript, and other PDF creation programs (like Jaws PDF Creator) to become PDF files and therefore printable by the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. There is a lot of information about this at Phil's site, as Mike notes.

All of the above assumes you're working on a MS Windows platform.

If you're working on the Linux platform, you can just print as you normally would in WordStar. Dosemu, the DOS emulator, handles printing DOS output to the USB port printer transparently.

There are a number of choices available to you, depending on how you like to work and which platform you are working on .

Good luck,
deedee