How to emulate an older printer....

December 9, 2009 10:15 PM

Does anyone know of a program that will capture a program's printout to a variety of different printer formats and allow me to print out the output on a newer printer?

My problem is this -- I have several older programs that print out to older printers and I would like to them to print out to my newer printers. Two of the programs are 10 plus years old.

I think I'm looking for a printer emulator system but I can't find the right one. I have gone through about 5 of them laboriously.

Otherwise, I think I am looking for what used to be called a "printer capture" file.

Any thots on this?

Thanks!

posted by Kalepa to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Run it in a VM - you can capture LPTx ports to a file.

You should also be able to map LPTx to a shared printer (MS KB article)
posted by wongcorgi at 11:01 PM on December 9, 2009

If you tell us which programs and which printers, there might be specific ways to make them do what you want; also, it will give us an idea of what kind of printing they're doing, which is always useful.
posted by flabdablet at 11:24 PM on December 9, 2009

I'm assuming these are DOS programs since you imply that they have their own printer drivers. (Because if they're not then it's trivial to install a generic PS or PDF windows printer which gives you a general format that you can print on any printer.) The next best thing would be if one of the printers it supports was a postscript printer. The Apple LaserWriter was a common one to use for this as it's been around forever and speaks pure postscript, so if it supports any model of LaserWriter then just capture that output and you have the document in postscript format, which is trivial to convert to PDF or any other format.
posted by Rhomboid at 12:03 AM on December 10, 2009