SQR/SQRW and Windows NT

[Howard Nelson <76543.2321@compuserve.com>]

Wally, and other SQR Users:

Its OK to send output to LPT1 under DOS but Windows isn't designed to do that.
Windows has a device independant architecture which means that it provides a
driver for each device.  Each program then talks to the device through its API.
So by using LPT1 you are actually circumventing the driver.  You can probably
get away with this for a while on Windows 3.1 but eventually you will run into
problems.

With our SQR reports we are creating a file using -F switch and once the report
is finished then call NPRINT (a Novell utility) to send it to the printer.  We
like this because we can archive the file on an optical disk.  NPRINT is very
fast at spooling so its not a great sacrifice of performance.

SQR 3.0 has a new switch on the command line, -PRINTER:WP, which uses the
default Window Print Driver to produce the output.  You may prefer this.  I have
been testing SQR 3.0 and I am very pleased with it.  I have also tried running
it on Windows 95 and I have found very few problems.

I hope this helps.

Howard Nelson
Phoenix International

-----------------------
     We are having a problem printing with SQR/SQRW (2.5) and Windows NT 
     Workstation (3.5).  Here is the scenario:
        
     Novell network (3.11), and a workstation that has LPT1 captured to 
     a network print queue.  We call SQRW from Windows and specify the -F 
     parameter to be '-Fprn' to print directly to the PRN device.  Under Windows

     3.1, this works fine, but using Windows NT, it has various problems.  The 
     first print job sent to the printer doesn't come-out, and when you tell it 
     to print a second time, it print, but the print output is screwed-up (body 
     of the report prints first, followed by a page with the headings).
     
     Any ideas/suggestions?  We've thought of upgrading the SQR/SQRW 3.0, but 
     wanted to see if we could resolve first.