Printers and Filepro

[Brian K. White]

On 4/5/2012 12:31 PM, Kroboth, Joe wrote:
>
>
>>>> Just a vent:
>>>>
>>>> Yesterday was my day for dumb clients and printers.  I got 2 call
>>>> from clients who purchased new printers before checking with me.
>>>> Both purchased dumb  Windows printers.
>> [...]
>>>> It is always an afterthought to call us after buying a cheap printer
>>>> and finding it doesn't work with the program.
>>>
>>> You can't blame the customers. Who would even think you would need a
>>> special printer just to work with filePro?
>>
>> Who would think that they would make printers so dumb that they can't
>> even print the letter "A"?
>>
>> Unfortunately, the market has become "how cheap can we sell it for in
>> the store", totally ignoring "how much is this printer *really* going
>> to cost, once you add in ink (which you can't buy in bulk because the
>> ink has more brains than the printer, and will expire on a given date,
>> regardless of how much ink is still left) and other expenses".
>>
>> As I like to say... "free after rebate is too expensive".
>>
>> --
>> Kenneth Brody
>
> Why would a customer care how the letter "A" is printed?
>
> When the printer specifications states it works with Windows,  one would think it should work with filePro on Windows.
>
> Joe

It's true the first time filepro claimed to be a Windows app instead of 
a dos app, it should probably have had the ability to print via gdi.

But to be fair, you could almost as rightfully blame Windows as any app 
like filepro.

After all, filepro didn't change, the OS did.

The day MS stopped supplying dos and started supplying only Windows in 
it's place, and started providing the gdi interface while still claiming 
to support existing apps, it should have supplied a virtual printer 
interface that allowed a dos app to print text and windows translates it 
into gdi as just part of that support.

More productively, if I cared the slightest bit about Windows or filepro 
on windows, IE if MY business were writing and supporting filepro apps 
on windows, I'd have started using this years ago when it first appeared:
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/automatedanyprinter.html

Or more likely rolled my own more filepro-specific variation of one of 
the several different approaches described on that site. By now no one 
should even have any problem with those examples and that free software 
having been available for so long.

And that's if the RTF thingie that fp themselves have been supplying for 
years didn't work or was otherwise objectionable for whatever reason.

I see a little, but only a very little excuse for complaining here.
Getting together a virtual printer driver like that is a little 
complicated, but only one time and that could have been done years ago.

Don't you all call yourselves developers and integrators?

Take one of those example methods, create a project on code.google.com 
and upload the files and start a wiki document there. Then start 
tweaking it to work for filepro instead of word perfect and start 
developing the simplest possible instructions or recipe for how to 
configure filepro to use it. Maybe make an nsis installer. It won't work 
at all at first but one little piece at a time it eventually work great. 
The software and even the hosting is all free and the examples are 
already there to do something almost exactly the same as what you need 
for filepro. It's all there and all free and all almost already done for 
you.

-- 
bkw