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Printing a test page is the final step
when connecting a printer. This ensures that the printer is
functioning properly, the driver software is installed and working
correctly, and the printer and computer are communicating.
There are several ways of printing a test page from the
computer:
- Using the Print Test Page option from the Add Printer Wizard
– After
adding a new printer to a computer, the user is given the option
of printing a test page.
If this step is skipped or a change
has been made and the user would like to print another test page,
this option can be accessed via the next method.
- Accessing the Print Test Page option
– In Windows, click
Start, select Settings, and choose the Printers folder.
Alternatively, double click to open My Computer and then open the
Printers folder. Right-click on the icon of the printer and choose
Properties. This will open a dialog box containing most of the
customizable features of that particular printer. Near the bottom
of the General tab there will be a button labeled Print Test Page.
Clicking on this button will initiate the printing of a test page,
which is followed by another dialog box asking the user if the
page printed correctly. If not, the built-in help files will walk
the user through the troubleshooting steps.
- Use an application to print a test page
– All computers
have a basic text application installed. In Windows, a good
application to use is a text editor such as NotePad or WordPad.
Start the text editor by clicking on the Start button and then
select Programs > Accessories > and either NotePad or
WordPad. After
typing in a few lines of text, choose File from the menu bar and
then Print. If the printer is installed and configured correctly,
it should print the text on the screen. To test the graphics (or
color) capabilities of the printer, start a drawing application,
such as Paint, and print a test page. If a file has already been
created and saved, the user can right-click on the file and select
Print from the menu of options. This will cause Windows to open
the file in the associated application and print automatically.
- Send a file directly to a parallel port printer through the
command line
– Another way of printing a test page is to use
command line statements to send a file directly to the printer.
When command line oriented operating systems were the only
operating systems on computers, this was a very popular method for
testing the printer as well as printing documents. Printing from
the command line is limited to ASCII files only (such as .txt and
.bat files). To begin a command line session in Windows, click
Start, choose Run, type in COMMAND.COM, and click
Ok. This opens
up a shell session. At the command line prompt, type the following
command:
TYPE thefile.txt > PRN
In the above command, each element has the following role:
| TYPE
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This "types" the file to an output device.
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thefile.txt
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This is the ASCII file to be printed.
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| >
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This
redirects the file to a specific output device.
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| PRN
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This sets
the printer to be the output device.
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If an ASCII file is not available, the current directory can be
printed using this command:
DIR > PRN
Note: This command should be
utilized with caution, as the directory might be very large and will
cause an large amount of paper waste.
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