>Naomi
>
>The only special character I use is CHR (15) to condense fonts
>I can find out the user printer code and change it, but the problem is that it does not print
>in raw mode even if remove the CHR.

If you're condensing fonts, you are not printing simple text. You're using decorated text - which was still in the fast draft mode on dot matrix printers. On a laser, there's a different matter - it's not the draft vs NLQ (where draft was fast and NLQ required that every line be printed two or more times), it's the usage of fonts already in the printer, or fonts downloaded to the printer before printing, or the whole text rendered into bitmaps before printing. The so-called GDI printers don't have the 2nd option at all, i.e. they can only take raw text using factory fonts (which usually means "either Courier or learn the exact code sequence to change font to any other factory font"), or image of the page prepared by the OS.

I have once written some code which would read a decorated text file, with ESC/P sequences in it, and would replace those with corresponding PCL3 sequences (as the printers we were using then were either HP lasers, or OKI lasers which understood PCL3 language) and that worked... sort of. There were problems with carriage returns and horizontal lines - the lines would appear over the previous line instead of under it. I eventually gave up on that and rewrote the code which was creating the text to generate HTML - then ran the browser (from FPD2.6 under W98) to print it. On a laser, there's no visible speed difference between printing anything in raw text mode or in graphic mode, at least not on today's machines. It may take some time to push a complicated page with lots of shadings, large images etc through the cable, but as long as the size of the resulting page image doesn't cause the machine to start swapping memory to disk, this is fairly fast, and depends more on the set resolution (which decides how much memory will be needed) than on anything else.

IOW, your problem was once solved, and I didn't like the solution - and I haven't kept the code. It was just not worth the trouble.