Emulating a DOS printer in Notepad or Wordpad

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Is there any way to configure Notepad or Wordpad in Windows 7 so that printing text files works like the PRINT command in DOS? 85 monospaced characters per line, 66 lines per page, no headers, footers, margins, or software-inserted form feeds?

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Is there any way to configure Notepad or Wordpad in Windows 7 so that printing text files works like the PRINT command in DOS? 85 monospaced characters per line, 66 lines per page, no headers, footers, margins, or software-inserted form feeds?

You could try installing the “Generic Text Only” printer – but I haven’t tried it in Windows 7, only in XP. It may not be available in Windows 7. People seem to have had pretty mixed results with it, anyway.

BATcher

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You could try installing the “Generic Text Only” printer – but I haven’t tried it in Windows 7, only in XP. It may not be available in Windows 7. People seem to have had pretty mixed results with it, anyway.

Can you give me a link, or otherwise tell me how to do that? Thanks.

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Just go to Printers and Faxes (in XP) and click on Add Printer. Choose Local printer, change the port to File. In Manufacturer, choose Generic, and in Printers choose Generic / Text Only.

You’ll have to find the equivalent path in Windows 7 (don’t have a W7 box to hand), but it’s much the same.

Hope it works!

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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I might make you aware of a freeware text editor EditPad Lite which can run rings around certain of the default text editors, and in the case of NotePad can be set as the default editor if you so choose. (There are at least one or two others, but that is my longstanding choice.)

That doesn’t answer you question directly, but I suggest you give it a try and take it from there.

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Hi Thomas,

In Notepad, you can suppress the header & footer output via File|Page Setup. As for controlling the # characters per line, I suggest setting the font (via Format|Font) to a suitable size in Courier New or another fixed-width font, then adjusting the page margins (again, via File|Page Setup) so that you end up with the desired line width & count.

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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