>Ah, yes . . . the DOS method. I hope not to have to resort to this. Printer selection and direction is still a problem in modern networked offices. It used to be easy with local printers. In addition, you still have the issue of defining the printer. You need a DOS driver to addres issues like font selection and page length etc.
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>Thanks for your reply.
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>Dick Harrold

When you said "line printer" in the original message, I took it to mean a continuous-form impact printer working in character mode, in which case font selection would not be an issue. If you print directly, drivers are not an issue either. If font settings or other printer control strings are necessary, you can build your own easily enough and prepend or embed them in your output strings where necessary. If you're printing on continuous forms, you can append blanks lines at the bottom, instead of sending page ejects, which will accomodate any page length without the printer having to "know" about it. As you say, it was easier with local printers, but all of the above should still work fine if you're capturing a local LPT port and redirecting it over the network to a shared printer.