Controling printers at a detailed level

This may be the wrong forum for this question. If there is a better, please
advise me.

Years ago, in the pre-Windows days, I wrote code to directly control
printers using ESC sequences (I believe that's what they were called). I
could get them to TAB, LF and CR and I could adjust various things like
fonts and font size. All these printer control codes were generally vendor
specific.

Now, I'd like to do something similar within a Win32 Windows program. I'd
like to grab control of a laser printer and control page size and line
height and tab spacing and a raft of things. I want to print labels and
signs of various sizes and I want a lot of control of the text and imagery
on them. And I'm a bit puzzled how to start.

Let me say that I've been a Windows C++ Win32 programmer for many years but
I've never had to wander into the world of printers before.

I suspect that the modern interface to printers has been abstracted so that
all the vendor specific stuff has gone away. If that's true, then somewhere
out there are a group of APIs that will allow me to do what I want. I've
scanned the MSDN library to see what I could find but thus far I've come up
with a blank. Can someone give me a gentle push in the right direction?

Many thanks,

Dennis


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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Outputting Formatted data to file
    ... The code is using carriage control. ... There was and is no standard way to define or inquire about what files are ... printers and printer drivers, independent of programming languages. ... Perhaps asa, or something begining with f ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Re: Binary or Ascii Text?
    ... drum printers, ... control chars like ... On mainframes the TTY used was mainly configured to make a cr even ... a lot of punch card readers as program input ...
    (comp.lang.c)
  • Re: Color Value
    ... >> inks do not directly map to the CMYK values in Photoshop. ... > I suspect that the same must be true for all printers. ... > control which inks are used. ... cartridge, then with the good photo cartridge and the deprimed color cartridge. ...
    (comp.periphs.printers)
  • Re: Controling printers at a detailed level
    ... Dennis ... > printers using ESC sequences. ... All these printer control codes were generally ... I'd like to do something similar within a Win32 Windows program. ...
    (microsoft.public.win32.programmer.mmedia)
  • RE: Blank fields when adding new record to combo box
    ... If you have a control on your form named Frodo, ... StartDate = StartDate ... you need to requery the combo so it has the new vendor in the ... Private Sub Combo35_NotInList ...
    (microsoft.public.access.formscoding)