looking for printer driver

[rendrag]

My goal is to print out the data on my screen as a CSV text file.

The software I'm using (timekeeping software for our employees) displays to screen, or prints to a printer. That printer could be anything in my printers folder (network/local printer, PDF file, etc)

So MSFN community, do any of you know of somewhere I could get a CSV print driver? I want to take what's on my screen, and "print" it as a CSV text file.

I've tried the generic text printer driver available to windows, however that doesn't print any of the data on my screen. For some reason it prints our company name, and then the title of the window, but nothing else.

thanks in advance for the help

[LLXX]

...what is on the screen?

Manually inserting commas is the only way I can think of..

[rendrag]

...what is on the screen?

employee's names, dept, and hours worked for the range i requested.

When i use the generic text print driver, none of that information is actually "printed" to the file.

If it would just print out text, I could deal w/o the commas, but I can't even get that far

Edited June 2, 2006 by rendrag

[allen2]

Does the generic text file print to the port "FILE" ? If this doesn't work, you can try to analyse the print output to a postscript file. But this won't be very easy.

[rendrag]

I'm telling it to output to "FILE:", and i do have to give it a file name ending in .prn.

opening that file in notepad, wordpad, or any other text editor gives me a bunch of nothing

[allen2]

Could you post the files generated when printing with generic text driver and with HP 5si PS driver ?

From what you say it's look like the software is printing in graphic mode.

[rendrag]

here's my most recent try. I had to rename the extension to .txt, as .prn wasn't allowed

6_3.txt

[jaclaz]

It is possible that the program does NOT output text, but rather an image or graphics not supported by plain txt printers?

That would be consistent with your results with TXT printer.

Try installing a PDF printer, than open the resulting file with Foxit PDF reader and see if you can copy (and paste elsewhere the text).

jaclaz

Edited June 3, 2006 by jaclaz

[phkninja]

if your looking for a quich and simple pdf printer give pdf blender a try. As was said above the output file lokks as if the program is trying to print binary data reather than text (like an image)

[rendrag]

it's strange because in the program's window, I can highlight the various pieces of text, and copy/paste the text out of the program into a seperate text file. That's why i don't understand why it won't print as text to a file.

I want to avoid PDFs because the data can't be extracted individually... basically what's going to happen is that the hours will be parsed by a payroll program and will spit out a paycheck.

I suppose I could just copy and paste the information out of the program by hand, but it's not as easy as just hitting print .

any other suggestions, feel free to chip in

[LLXX]

If you can copy+paste the text when it has been printed to a PDF, then you can just use one of the many pdf->txt programs available to get your desired output.

[rendrag]

ah, i didn't know that... thanks