Printing on a 32 Colum Receipt printer

[zed]

Ello pple

I know what to expect on this one but thought Id ask, is there anyway to alter the receipts to get them to fit on 32 column printer? As printer does not support 40 characters. Even having to lose a colum or 2 doesnt really concern me.

Printing to Parallel port which is redirected to the com port. works fine, just missing last column on receipts.

Thanks

[Dale Harris]

Zed,

Well the good news is that it is, of course, possible to have the program print 32 columns wide. The questions is, is it practical?

To print 32 columns wide all parts of each program file that print anything would have to be altered. This would require that I make changes in the POS.EXE, POSCONFG.EXE, RECEIVE.EXE, CF2.EXE, FILEINFO.EXE, STOCKS.EXE, and SONDSCAN.EXE program files. When you figure that I will have to make considerable changes in 7 different program files and then have to extensively test all of the files, I figure that it would take 2 to 3 months before 32 column printing would be ready. Of course during that time I would not be able to add any other feature to the POS program because I will be spending all of my programming time on 32 column printing.

The easiest thing to do would be to make room for 32 column printing by eliminating either 40 column or 80 column printing. However since tens of thousands of people use either one or both of those widths this is not an option. This means that I would have to add an additional format to each printing routine in each program file.

While most of the program files have room to add the thousands of bytes that would be required to add another printing width, the POS.EXE program is very short of unused space. I guess that I could write off one of the proposed new features that I am plannning on shoehorning into it. Let's see, I could drop the X-Charge feature that I am currently working on or I could drop the "customer accounts" feature that is planned for the future. Eliminating either one of those features could provide room required to add 32 column printing to POS.EXE. However the problem with that is that thousands of people are looking forward to eventually using those features. How many people do you think will absolutely require 32 column printing to be able to use DHPOS?