PrintFil

What works

Software installation, configuration and activation work flawlessly. It is necessary to configure DosBOX-X to capture the print and save it to a file in a directory also accessible from printfil (for example by mapping the working directory of the MS-DOS application as Z: in the wine configuration) and to configure printfill to capture this file when it appears. It is also advisable to activate print preview inside printfil.

What does not

The capture of the LP1 port obviously does not work on Linux as it does not exist, it is mandatory to configure DosBOX-X to capture the print and produce a file on the disk.

Printing directly to PDF or email from printfil does not work, but if you set up a PDF printer on Linux you can still print to this printer and still get PDF files of the printouts.

If you do not activate the print preview within the printfill options, the printouts may occur with misaligned characters.

Printfil must be active in the background to capture the prints produced by ms-dos applications, on windows printfill is started automatically on Linux it is necessary to start it by hand, or provide a script that is automatically started by KDE or the Gnome (or other window manager ).

It seems that after a certain number of times that printfil is run inside winehq it corrupts the registry and a .dat file that prevents it from starting.

Workarounds

To overcome the problem of corruption of the printfil installation just create a tgz file containing the files that are corrupted and unpack it at each start, I bring you the script "start-printfill.sh" (in case you used playonlinux):

#!/bin/sh

rm -rf *.reg
tar -xf restore.tgz --overwrite
sleep 1
/usr/share/playonlinux/playonlinux --run "Printfil"

the file must be made executable with chmod +x start-printfill.sh
the restore.tgz file must contain these files, captured from the fresh printfil installation on wine:

> drive_c
---> Program Files
--------> Printfil
--------------> your-custom-file.seq
--------------> messages.dat
--------------> printfil.dat
--------------> your-license-file.pfl
system.reg
userdef.reg
user.reg

Example of the icon shortcut that start printfil / command to start printfil automatically (if you use playonlinux):
'/home/yourpath/PlayOnLinux'\''s virtual drives/printfil/start-printfill.sh'

it may seem cumbersome to do the first time but after these workarounds printfil works great.

What was not tested

I have tested all functions

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Intel
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments