DATATYPE = <string>
The command DATATYPE=RAW prevents A-Shell from doing any special processing relating to the CR, LF, and FF control characters.
This may be necessary in order to embed raw graphics into print files, as may be needed with certain EPF (e.g. Zebra label printer) and PCL protocols.
Otherwise, even though PASSTHROUGHpq mode sounds like it "passes everything through", in reality, you still get conversion of isolated LF into CRLF, and it still identifies page breaks by FF (i.e. chr(12)), calling a standard GDI printing routine to inform the printer of the start of a page. The LF to CRLF conversion would obviously alter any graphic image, and the page break call may have had unknown results, depending on the driver.
Old Documentation, superseded
(Windows only) This parameter is passed to the Windows printer manager when preparing to spool a file, and may or may not be interpreted by the printer driver. Prior to A-Shell build 715, A-Shell always specified "Text". Then, from builds 715 thru 719, it specified NULL. From builds 720-732 it specified "RAW" if PASSTHROUGH=ON, else "EMF". These changes were made per suggestions by Microsoft to attempt to work around various printer driver bugs.
In any case, DATATYPE allows you to experiment with this setting if you are encountering mysterious Spool32 errors. It was mainly added to eliminate the need to go back to a prior version of A-Shell in order to test it. (Some people claim that the Spool32 errors did not occur prior to build 714.) Note that if you do not specify DATATYPE, it defaults to the current behavior (RAW or EMF.)
