>Thank you very much, Dragan:
>
>I was descouraged because of the bit of help I received...
>
>Look: I can't understand why "SET DEVI TO FILE CFILE" doesn't work on a paralell printer. No file is created. If I hadn't tried at home I would know "that is not the way. I am wrong" but at home a file is created and the printer prints very well.
>
>Anyway today I got to print well with "@ say... " no error ocurred with ??? non_existing_file and the printer printed quickly...

To print with @say I used a routine like this:

parameters stamp, adi, 
if adi
	Set Printer To (stamp) addi
else
	Set Printer To (stamp)
	_pageno=1
endif
Set Console Off
Set Print On
Set Devi To Print

When I was done, I'd call the opposite routine:

Set Print Off
Set Printer To
Set Console On
Set Devi To Scree

The first one was last touched in 1998, the latter on 8th of March 1999.

I used to have a lot of @say printing, but then went on and replaced all of it with ? and ??, simply because every time I'd insert a line somewhere I'd have to recalculate the row position etc. Also, with the advent of textmerge, it was far simpler to do some things with \ and \\.

>What do you mean you haven't used "???" since 1990??????? Haven't you used an ESC/2 printer in all that time?

I think the last time I did something printer specific was in 1999 - translating the ESC/P2 sequences into HP's PCL.

I didn't use ??? because it goes directly to printer, and we have always created a text file that the user could view online before deciding to print it. Saved lots of trees that way - the users got the chance to get their numbers onscreen without waiting for the dot matrix's noise to stop :).