Incomplete printing under Labview 5.01 on NT4.0

[Sudar]

Hardware and Software
1. Operating System Win NT on Pentium III PC
2. I am running an application developed on Labview 5.01

Problem as noticed.

1. At then end of a Batch completion, the program sends formated text
strings to the default printer (Epson dot matrix)
2. Printing stars immediately and stops after about 80% to 90% of
completion.
3. If I wait for a long time, the rest of the characters print slowly one
by
one. I did not wait to see it completed.
4. If I give another print instruction, the pending / leftover characters
are printed immediately, then again prints normally upto the same place
where it stopped, and the process goes on.
5. To give you a clue, I just isolated the VI which does the
printing and
ran only that portion of the VI, the problem remains the same.
6. While the printer sitting / waiting to print the remaining characters,
if
I exit the vi and also quit Labview, then ofcourse. it prints the remaining
characters.
7. It appears as if Labview gives only some time to print and then the
control is taken away.
8. If I run the program under WIN 95, I have no problem.
9. I have tried with 3 printers and 2 computers, 3 different cables, they
are behaving the same way.
10. I have isolated the problem to Labview 5.01 NT version. I need to find
a
solution please.

I tried looking into the Discussion Forum, could not find any answers.

Could you please look into this problem on a priority basis and let me
know.


Please find attached vi with text string to be printed.
If you could run this vi from a NT machine with Labview 5.01 installed and
it should print on to a dot matrix printer.
You may even see the problem with any printer connected to yo
ur parallelport.
You will notice that up to line starting with 4 will print and then stop.
The rest will print if you run it again or close Labview.

[Sudar]

I have updated service pack to ver. 6a.
Sudar

[Kent Leung]

I have several suggestions.

1. Follow your serial write with a windows Flush com buffers.vi in the vi.lib\platform\_sersup.llb. This may result in the flushing of the rest of your characters to the printer.

2. According to Microsoft this problem can occur when client applications do not append form-feed commands to their print jobs and the Print Manager default datatype is RAW. The workaround this problem, set the default datatype value to RAW [FF Auto] or [RAW FF Appended], or reconfigure the client application to append a form feed (\r) to print jobs.

3. It could also be that the printer is expecting an ESC code to tell it the job is finished and for it to spool the rest of print job.

4. Another solution may be to write the characters to a f
ile and then use the system exec to print the file directly to lpt1 using copy lpt1.

I might suggest updating to a new version of LabVIEW to provide a broader range of print options such as NI-Reports which would allow you better control over your print jobs to your printer.

Marcus Monroe
National Instruments