[Tutor] Printing in Windows (was: Further help needed!

[Terry Carroll]

I've edited the subject line to be a little more clear.

On Wed, 4 Jan 2006, John Corry wrote:

> I am using the following code to send a text file to the printer:-

 [ snip ]

> This code works on windows XP + Windows 2000.  However it does not work on
> windows 98SE. 

Well, at least that narrows it down.  This continues to befuddle me.

I don't know enough about Windows to know the differences that might be 
here for this purpose.

Question: do you need to use the Windows print function, or can you live 
with printing it yourself (as below)?

For example, if you use the ShellExecute approach, it actually causes an 
application to be invoked for you, which does the printing, just as if you 
right-clicked on the file and selected "print."  ON my system, for 
example, that will invoke Notepad, which prints it with a heading and a 
page number at the bottom.

But, if you don't care about that, assuming your file is straight text, 
try the win32print approach from 
http://tgolden.sc.sabren.com/python/win32_how_do_i/print.html . Here's an 
attempt that seems to work for me:

-------------------------------

import win32print

lines_to_print = open("testprint.txt","r").readlines()
print_data = ''
for line in lines_to_print:
   print_data=''.join([print_data,line,"\r"]) 

printer_name = win32print.GetDefaultPrinter()
printer = win32print.OpenPrinter(printer_name)
print_job = win32print.StartDocPrinter(printer, 1, ("Printer test", None, "RAW"))
win32print.WritePrinter(printer, print_data)
win32print.EndDocPrinter(printer)
win32print.ClosePrinter(printer)
-------------------------------

The for-loop is a kludge; my first attempt was something like
    print_data=open("testprint.txt","r").read()
but it turns out my printer needs a carriage return on each line.

I suspect that printer handling is more likely to be inconsistent between 
Win98 and Win/XP than the ShellExecute you were already using, and so this 
may not work; but it's worth looking into.