Printing to LPT1 on Windows 11

[E118219]

I have a Clipper application that I converted to xBase++ with eXpress++.The application prints to a dot matrix printer and onto a piece of card that is used on the shop floor of an engineering company and I found that using a Windows printer I couldn't print to the edges of the card like it used to under DOS so I ended up continuing to print directly to LPT1 and in order to be able to get this to work the application starts via a bat file which redirects the LPT1 output to a dot matrix printer that is defined in windows. I use the following commands to direct the lpt1 output (the PC no longer has a lpt1 port) to a shared printed, and this worked fine under Windows 10.

net use lpt1: /del
net use lpt1 "\\127.0.0.1\EPSON FX-2190IIN"

However the customer has just installed a new PC with Windows 11 and the same setup no longer works. I have compared the printer configuration on both machines and it looks identical, but on the Windows 10 machine the application prints to the dot matrix printer but on the Windows 11 machine it does not. No errors are displayed, there are no print jobs in the queue and the application doesn't hang but appears as if it has printed the output.

If I open a cmd window on either machine and type the above commands in and then the following:-

net use lpt1: /del
net use lpt1 "\\127.0.0.1\EPSON FX-2190IIN"
dir > lpt1

Then I get a directory listing printed on the dot matrix printer as expected, so it appears it is just my application which no longer works as expected.

Any help gratefully received. I have already told the customer he may have to stick with Windows 10 but I would like to try and fix it for him.

[PedroAlex]

hI,

On a shared printer you need to set permissions on the windows driver and the correct way to print should be something like this.

https://doc.alaska-software.com/content ... rinter.cxp

[Wolfgang Ciriack]

That is a problem, i had with Win11, too.
I solved this in my code, with putting a Dot to the Device:
Set Printer to (cPort), where cPort is f.e. "LPT1."
If cPort is only "LPT1" (without dot) the print results in a file lpt1.prn.