Pocket DOS - Setting Up for Printing
Setting Up the System to Print to a Printer:
If you are using a portable printer (Canon BJC 80 or Epson LX 300 Plus or Okidata 184 or 284) or some similar parallel or serial printer, you will need to set it up before you can make use of it. We are going to assume that you have the proper cables and the print speeds, if variable (serial printers only) have already been set.
First select Start or Settings and from the popup window select Printer. There are a series of screens which you will scroll through on which to make changes.
Screen # 1: The first screen is just an introduction, and there is no change needed to be made. Simply click Next.
Screen # 2: This screen asks you which type of printer to print out results to. Serial/parallel is the default and will have a small black dot in a circle at the top left of the screen. We don't have any users using infrared printers any longer, so don't select that option. You may have a unit set up to print to a file; but that is rare, and we are still testing this option. Typically, you don't need to change anything if you are using an older serial or parallel printer. Simply click Next.
Screen # 3: On the third screen, you are asked for the port to use. On the Allegro CX, select COM2. On the Trimble Ranger 300X, the Trimble Nomad 800B/900G, and the Nautiz X7, select COM1. On the Nautiz X5, you will also use COM1; but since we don't have any users printing directly to an older printer with this model, the procedure cannot be documented for sure. There also has been no testing with the Natuiz X3; since the posting of this information that unit has yet to be released. Therefore, make sure that COM1 or COM2 is set based on your handheld unit.
Screen # 4: This screen is where most of the changes are made. Typically, all of our systems are set to 9600 baud, but some customers use 19,200 and others 57,600. All of these are valid settings and are available. 19,200 is the default setting for a brand new Epson LX 300 Plus printer; and if you just took it out of the box and didn't change anything, you could use this setting. If you get garbled output (not just no output) that looks like hieroglyphics, then the print speed is not right. Simply start up the printer setting option again, and change the speed until the output is readable. Other than the baud rate which is set on the top line, the only other setting is the flow control which is set on the bottom line. We want this to be set to xOn-xOff. The default value is None. The flow control is how the handheld unit communicates with the printer and it tells the handheld to stop sending information while the printer is trying to print out what it already has in its available memory. If the setting is not set properly, it is likely that you will loose lines on a multiple page printout. The other 2 settings are 8 bit words and 1 stop bit. These are system defaults and don't need to be changed. After all settings have been made, select Next.
Screen # 5: The last page doesn't make any difference, as far as I can tell. The system will always save your settings for you, so you don't have to click this option. It will simply unset it when you exit. Now click the Apply, or Save or, 'X' button to save all of your settings.
Note: If you said to print to a file instead of to a printer, then the 3rd screen is not the com port to use but the name and a location of the file to print to. Normally, leave the name the same as that shown since we will have set this name up for you along with the destination. The print to a file option is only used with PocketBoy printing to a Bluetooth printer. The use of this type of printing is not covered here in the Pocket DOS setup tasks.