BCX Printer Procedures

PRINTER OPEN statement

LPRINT statement

PRINTER CLOSE statement

Purpose: LPRINT prints directly and only to LPT1. Anything that you can PRINT and FPRINT, you can also LPRINT. The PRINTER OPEN statement must precede LPRINT and PRINTER CLOSE follow to close the printer port.


 Syntax:

 PRINTER OPEN
 LPRINT comma separated expressions
 PRINTER CLOSE

 Parameters:

  • comma separated expressions Expressions to be printed. Each line of comma separated expressions sent to LPRINT is limited to 2048 bytes.

A simple LPRINT demonstration:


 PRINTER OPEN

 FOR INTEGER i = 1 to 50
  LPRINT "This is line number ", i , ".  BCX matures again!"
 NEXT

 LPRINT CHR$(12)  ' Form Feed(eject from paper printer)

 PRINTER CLOSE

PRINTER EJECTPAGE statement

Purpose: The PRINTER EJECTPAGE statement notifies the printer that the application has finished writing to a page. This statement is used to tell the printer to eject the page. The PRINTER OPEN and LPRINT statements must precede PRINTER EJECTPAGE and PRINTER CLOSE follow to close the printer port.


 Syntax:

 PRINTER OPEN
 LPRINT comma separated expressions
 PRINTER EJECTPAGE
 PRINTER CLOSE

 Parameters:

  • comma separated expressions Expressions to be printed. Each line of comma separated expressions sent to LPRINT is limited to 2048 bytes.

Here is a second method to print to a printer. BCX opens a connection to the printer using a handle to PRN, a standard printer communications device. The data then is output to the printer using a PRINT statement. LPT1 should also work instead of PRN.

Here is a simple example for sending data to the default printer.


 DIM i

 OPEN "PRN" FOR OUTPUT AS fp1

 FOR i = 1 TO 60
  PRINT #fp1,"This is line number" , i
 NEXT

 PRINT #fp1,CHR$(12)   'CHR$(12) is Form Feed Character

 CLOSE fp1