Is there a way to set up a default printer in Reality (using SSM) that is
NOT dependent on the name of the printer in Windows? Example...I have
Reality running on a laptop that will be shared by 5 different people each
with a different printer at their home. User 1 uses the laptop with his
Epson printer on Monday and then gives the laptop to User 2 on Tuesday for
use with her HP printer and so on. How do you save this problem without
having each user go into SSM and change the name of the printer?

Possibly assign the printer based on user logon? Make a simple table of user
and corresponding default printer name. At time of logon, check the table and
assign the appropriate printer. That's one of many ways, i'm sure

"PtLin" <ptlin (AT) aol (DOT) com> wrote

So I would have to start each printer in SSM first? How many parallel
printers will Reality let you have?

Ricky,

I think you mean 'SPM' and not 'SSM'. Anyway, the way I would tackle this,
is to define each of the five printers within Windows, then create five
Reality despoolers each matching one of the printers within the Windows
environment. They can all share the same formqueue, so create one formqueue
and add each of the five despoolers to it. Now have a logon proc which looks
at the user they have logged in with and xref this to the appropriate
Reality despooler. Then simply start that despooler and assign to the
formqueue that you also created.

I think the above is similair to what 'ptlin' is suggesting. Also to answer
your later post, there is no limit on the number of despoolers that Reality
can have configured.

HTH
Mark Fuller

"Ricky" <ricky (AT) fawnridge (DOT) com> wrote

When I deal with printers from reality I normally rely on them being generic
text printers. Which means I have a duplicate printer set up with the text
driver, pointed to the same device. So you could set up a generic text
printer on your laptop to lpt1, reality prints to this printer name. As long
as people are plugging into the parallel port you are fine.


"Ricky" <ricky (AT) fawnridge (DOT) com> wrote

The problem these days, with that approach, is that in a Windoze
environment, more and more printers are GDI based, and therefore need to be
fed through their own print driver to print.

In addition, more and more "desktop" printers are USB based that the Generic
Text Printer > LPT1 approach can hardly ever be *relied* on!

It would appear that Microsoft's concept of the Parallel port becoming
redundant in the same way as the serial port is becoming a reality (no pun
indended) - my PC doesn't even have a serial port!

It all adds up to make the job of installing printers much more difficult -
we used to take the approach of just adding a default printer on each PC on
the network as we installed our software - share it as "textprinter" and
then automatically configure a Generic Text printer pointing to it using
it's share name on the server.. This would easily enable a user to print to
local printer from within our application... You can forget that these
days... You need to manually load up the correct driver and configure on
the server to get the darn things working... It's a real pain in the ass!
At least with Windows XP and Windows 2003 server in combination, the
server/PC automatically discovers all pc's on the network and adds them!

Regards
Simon
"Brent Tyler-Davies" <brent (AT) nomail (DOT) sandfield.co.nz> wrote