Slow Dot Matrix Printer

[mujty]

Hello everyone,

I finally finished setting up Classic version 12.05 (previously using v11.0 for DOS). Peachtree is being used for invoicing ONLY and nothing else. The operating system is Windows 2000 Professional.

The Lexmark 2380 dot-matrix printer is BLAZING fast under v11.0 on DOS. Under v12.05, however, the same printer prints very slowly. In fact, the same invoice takes exactly 4 times longer to print. It seems as if Peachtree is forcing the printer to print in Near Letter Quality mode. I have tried forcing Fast Draft mode using the physical control panel on the printer itself and the driver settings from within the Windows 200 Printer Control Panel, but I have had no luck.

After reading a couple of posts on this forum, I added a Generic/Text Only printer on LPT1, went into Peachtree, changed the CONFIG for printer 1 to the Generic/Text Only printer and Continuous Forms and proceeded to print an invoice. The BLAZING speed was back... except that the first character of each line is cut off. To confirm that the problem is not with the Lexmark 2380 printer, I hooked up an older Citizen dot-matrix printer and the same thing happened - the first character of each line is cut off.

I proceeded to troubleshoot further and printed to a text file (via the Generic/Text Only printer) and opened the text file (called INVOICE.TXT) in Notepad. The invoice looks fine and all characters are there. I printed via Notepad just as a test, it printed fine, but Notepad prints slowly with a Courier font so it wasn't a real test. I then opened a Command Prompt window and typed "COPY INVOICE.TXT LPT1" and surprisingly the Lexmark 2380 printer printed with BLAZING fast speed and this time did not cut off the first character of each line. Obviously, printing to a text file and then copying the text file to LPT1 is a very annoying workaround.

I have also played with the Lexmark 2380's internal menu quite a bit, but with no luck.

At this point I am stumped and that's why I'm posting here to see if anyone has had a similar problem in the past. Thanks for any assistance.

[jag]

You can still use the Lexmark printer driver. The thing that slows down the performance of the printer is the font. For example, if your printer has "x" printer font, you only got to select that specific font on your printer dialog box. What happens is that any true-type font has to be sent to the printer as a bitmap image, which slows down the performance of the printer. In contrast, the printer font works only by sending the ascii codes directly, which is far less data.

When you print from DOS of command prompt, the computer send the ASCII codes and the printer use the default printer font.

Now your question might be: How do I find/install the printer fonts. This can be easily done by installing the drivers/software that came with the printer. Then you can look on the control panel for the icon named "fonts" (I'm using XP, so I'm not sure where it is on 2000). In that folder you will see all the fonts that are currently installed on your computer. Look for the printer fonts (the vast majority are TTF or true type fonts) by the extension or the icon that it has. Then test printing using that font in notepad.

That should do the trick.

[mujty]

I will try this and post my results here. Question is: how can I change the font that Peachtree Classic v12.05 uses to print its invoices? I could not find a way to chage that font.

[jag]

To be quite honest, I don't work with PCA v12. So I thought you could change the font in that version (since it is designed for windows).

Maybe there's a simpler solution, but this is the workaround that I have found: Another two bits of advice: I have WinXP so maybe I can do this here and you cannot (or the way you do it changes drastically). Also, I'm assuming (as you said) that computer is only used for printing invoices, this changes will affect all your windows printing.

1) Go to the Lexmark's printer properties.
2) Click on Printer preferences button
3) Then click "Advanced"
4) You have here a complete list of features that you printer supports
5) In my case, with an Okidata 320ML I can change the print quality and how TTF font's are printer (I select as Printer Font). I'm pretty sure that Lexmark's will have similar settings, but be aware that they change from manufacturer to manufacturer.

Also, you might wanna disable the "Spool Print Jobs" by selecting Print directly to the printer to see if there are any changes in printing speed.