filePro and Windows (was Re: Printers and Filepro)

[Kenneth Brody]

On 4/5/2012 4:59 PM, Brian K. White wrote:
[...]
> 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.

I know this comes up every now and then, but...

filePro *is* a Windows app.  There is absolutely nothing DOS within it.  It 
has all rights and privileges of any other Windows app.  The only difference 
is that, by default, it has access to a console window to interact with a user.

GDI has no concept, nor support for, anything resembling a "print code". 
There is no such thing as "now start printing in bold", nor "turn underline 
on", nor even "start printing on a new line".  For filePro to support 
printing via GDI, it would basically require something like a PCL emulator 
to be built in.

> 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,

Note that 32-bit Windows still includes a DOS emulator, and Windows 7 
(32-bit) is capable of running the ancient MS-DOS versions of filePro.  (I 
have personally verified that filePro 1.1 runs on 32-bit Win7.)

> 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.

Note that, early on, many printer manufacturers did, in fact, include 
printer drivers that would capture output from MS-DOS apps and convert them 
as needed into Windows GDI.  (Or, support passing raw data to the printer 
via the Windows spooler, when the printers actually supported print codes.)

> 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

That looks like a method of printing to such printers from WordPerfect for 
DOS.  As noted above, filePro is not a DOS program.

[...]
> 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.

Unless there are solutions for Windows, rather than DOS, they don't apply here.

-- 
Kenneth Brody