chr(12) Form Feed in Notepad

[Tim Chase]

W. eWatson wrote:
> Grant Edwards wrote:
>> On 2010-01-15, W. eWatson <wolftracks at invalid.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I thought I'd put a page break, chr(12), character in a txt
>>> file I wrote to skip to the top of the page. It doesn't work.
>>> Comments?
>> Yes, it does work.
>>
> Apparently not with with my Brother 1440 laser printer. The character in 
> NotePad.txt looks like a small rectangle, and on the printed page. Same 
> result HP C6180 Photosmart.

But are you sending the raw control codes to the printer, or are 
you sending the image-of-my-text-document to a printer-GDI which 
then renders the as-you-see-it out of the printer?

The pseudo-pipeline comparison would be

   type file.txt > lpt1:

which would send the raw text file to the printer (assuming it's 
set up on LPT1, otherwise, use whatever port it's attached to in 
your printer control panel); or are you using something like

   notepad file.txt
   File -> Print

which renders to an internal image representation and then sends 
that image out to the printer.  If it were a dot-matrix printer, 
you'd here/see the difference in a jiffy -- the raw dump is fast 
and uses the printer's built-in fonts while the render-as-image 
is slow and NOISY.

One alternative is possibly to set up the "Generic Text" printer 
as a device type and attach it to the same port; I've had fair 
fortune with this letting me control the printer more directly if 
I want fast dumps (particularly on dot-matrix printers) rather 
than pretty dumps.

-tkc