Printing from DOS Applications

If you are still using MS-DOS applications, printing is one of the more problematic areas. Many modern inexpensive inkjet and laser printers don’t support output from DOS programs because they don’t have enough built-in smarts to form the character images by themselves. If you need laser or inkjet output from a DOS application, be sure that any new printer you buy uses a page-description language supported by your application, such as PostScript, HP’s PCL, or one of the Epson text formats.

Furthermore, most DOS applications can print only to LPT ports. If you want to use a printer that is on a USB port or is out there somewhere on a LAN, you must share the printer (even if it’s just attached to your own computer and you’re not using a network), and then issue the command net use lpt2: \\computername\sharename

from the Command Prompt window, replacing computername with your computer’s name and sharename with the name you used when you shared the printer. Direct your DOS program to use LPT2. (You can use LPT1, LPT2, or LPT3, but you must select an LPT port number that does not have an associated physical LPT port in your computer.)