The printer topic

Dear Forum members

Like most of us use QBasic for many years and don't want to lose or reprogram applications because newer operatingsystems don't support the good old QBasic anymore.

As many of you I've found this website because I own and support a Qbasic 4.5 application which I want to update so it's compatible with Windows Vista and newer Windows versions.

The application I have uses "Open LPTn" for 3 printers, and the shell solution isn't a real option since the application also handles errors with regards to printing failures.

Last year I've started to recode my application with Freebasic but this is very intensive because the syntaxes aren't fully compatible with QBasic. Today I've found QB64 and initially I was very happy because potentially I thought that I was able to recompile my code easily. However I got dissappointed because QB64 has very poor support for printing while most QBasic application of the past are written to use one or more LPT printers. I've searched the forum, but didn't find any sound solution for printing. Freebasic supports both LPTn and Operating system printers natively which is great.

I've decided to draft this topic because I would like to know whether or not it's realistic that support for printing (OS printers only will be fine) will be available soon within QB64, or recoding applications in Freebasic is the only real option.

Best regards
QB addict