Configure Printer

The printer configuration setup screen provides the program the necessary parameters to work with your printer requirements. With a little patience and experimentation you should be able to get your printer on-line with this program (assuming your not using the provided printer). I have used this program successfully with everything from Laser printers, ink jets, to dot matrix printers. All that was required for each installation was a small adjustment to the parameters listed.

The program is intended to be used with 8.5” x 11” paper in portrait format or if you have an Hewlett Packard desk jet you can print some reports in landscape. This program assumes you know a little about a printer and how to manipulate it. For instance, almost all dot matrix printers allow you to manipulate the left hand paper adjustment as well as the starting point where printing initiates. The printer port is about the most important item to set up. You must know from which parallel port your printer is connected. The three possibilities are LPT1, LPT2 or LPT3. The program defaults to <LPT1>. The brackets on either side of the port designation signifies that this is the default setting. As you select each item for modification one selection will be bracketed for default status. If the printer port is two (2) instead of one (1), then change the 1 to a 2. Spelling of the printer port is important. LPP1 (should be LPT1) will fail to print in a network environment. Under normal circumstances if the program is in a non-network environment the program gets its printer port from the TSR print or by Windows internal print spooler.

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Update 7/23/2012

Printer setup has changed. You will now select one of the printers connected through your computer. On startup the Printer will be blank and you will see a dialog with all the printers attached to your computer.

Select the printer and then save it. All your output will go to your Windows printer. Everything discussed in this section is still valid except the parallel ports: LPT1, LPT2, and LPT3

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If you have a Hewlett Packard compatible printer, select [Y] to the field HP PCL Print. what this does is to inform the program that you can print some forms/reports in landscape format. In the R/H side of the window are the margins for HP. They are defaulted to work with a desk jet. They are only modifiable when HP has been activated.

The left and right (NON-HP) margins are defaulted to 0 and 2 respectively. Page width is set to 80. If you have a wide carriage printer you can adjust this if you want to offset the printing a little more from the left edge. Page length is usually the item that I have to configure with each printer. If you print a report and it prints records on the next page, skips a little and then reprints the header, you know that you need to decrease this item. Experimentation works wonderful. The rest of the parameters are the top and bottom margin. The default settings are generally fine unless you don’t like what you see. Try it, modify it, and view the results for yourself.

You can toggle through the selections with the up and down arrow keys or select [ENTER] to proceed to the next item. After the HP Bottom Margin item you will be asked if you want to accept these modifications. Answering [Y] for yes will write the changes to the configuration file (CFGBDM.DBF) located in the BDM directory. Selecting anything else will cancel all changes and resort to the last configuration settings in that file.

If for any reason the configuration file becomes damaged or unusable, you will be prompted upon program startup that the file is not there. The program at that time will default to standard values. You should go to the configure menu, select or accept the new values and request to save the parameters. At this point it will ask you if you would like to create a new configuration file. Selecting [Y] for yes will create a new file with your new values. Selecting anything else will abandon the operation and the values will be derived from the default values setup internally within the code.