Hi,

I noticed that changing the "Preferences" of the destination printer selected from the printers dialog is not taking effect.
I'm sending to an INI file with these settings:
DEVICE=PROMPT:
BUFFER=4
FORMFEED=ON
ORIENTATION=PORTRAIT
TMARGIN=0
LMARGIN=0
LPP=70
WIDTH=132
FONT=arial
FONTHEIGHT=12
FONTWIDTH=0
PASSTHROUGH=OFF

which opens de printers window where if I go to Preferences and, for example, switch from colors to grayscale or select a different tray, the initial settings will be considered for the printing task.

What am I forgetting here?

I've just confirmed the problem occurs here to. Apparently A-Shell is resetting the printer after calling the preferences dialog.

On a side note, although it has no relation to this problem, you can remove your BUFFER=4 statement from all printer init files, as it only applied in A-Shell/DOS (affecting the buffering of the raw output to the LPT1 port). Also, note that the WIDTH command doesn't have the effect you might imagine; it's only used with PRINT/H to calculate the position of the "Page #" header. You're specifying a specific font size here, so the width would have no effect on it anyway, but if you did want to have the width affect the font size, it would be through the CPP (columns per page), typically in conjunction with PITCH=AUTO.

Let me investigate the problem and hopefully post a fix shortly...

I'm glad you can reproduce it.
Thanks for the advices regarding the other settings besides I don't care about them, from this file I just want the DEVICE, and this is the old way for printing, currently I create the PQI file on the fly.
I pasted the entire content of the INI file just in case of any of the settings could be the possible cause for the problem.

No special urgency here, thank you.

Ok, I posted a zipped 6.0.1241.3 (in http://www.microsabio.net/dist/60rc/bin-win/ ) with a patch for this. Please test it and let me know if it works without any other obvious side effects. (The patch was not as simple as I would have liked, having to do with the many permutations and contexts relating to the printer dialog.)

Note that you do need PASSTHROUGH=OFF (as you have above), in order for this capability to work.
(None of the other settings had any effect.)

Thanks Jack, it's working except for the Orientation that must be absent from the INI/PQI file, for example, using my INI file with all the settings above, if I change the tray, color scheme and orientation on the Preferences, it always prints in Portrait but if I comment the ORIENTATION=PORTRAIT the orientation defined on the Preferences will take place.
Probably this is what is expected, which I don't disagree.

I must admit that the problem of how to handle the orientation has been an on-going struggle. Up until this latest 1241.3 patch, A-Shell pretty much ignored the ORIENTATION parameter in the printer init file until after selecting the printer. And even then, it only worked to force LANDSCAPE.

In the process of investigating the original issue, it seemed annoying to me that the printer dialog didn't get initialized to match the requested ORIENTATION from the start. So I changed that, but the change was again more complicated than it sounds, and as a side effect caused the ORIENTATION in the printer init file to not only initialize the printer dialog, but then to override it later, even if you changed it within the printer dialog.

But as you say, that is arguably correct, since presumably if you went to the trouble of specifying an ORIENTATION in the printer init file, then you really wanted that orientation, and didn't want the user to change it (accidentally or deliberately).

So, unless or until someone posts a strong counter-argument, I'm inclined to leave it this way. In other words, if you specify an ORIENTATION in the printer init file, you're going to get it, regardless of whether you attempt to change it within the print dialog. Previously that was true only for ORIENTATION=LANDSCAPE, but it's now true for any explicit ORIENTATION. (Unfortunately there is no way to disable the orientation option in the printer dialog to make it clear to the user that they don't have power over it, but at least now the orientation in the dialog gets initialized properly.) If you want to allow the user to have control over the orientation, then you cannot specify an ORIENTATION in the print request or printer init file.

P.S. I think I'm going to need to make a few adjustments to the ORIENTATION topic in the documentation.