help with shared printer settings

I recently posted some sample Delphi code to do DDE to Acrobat. I have been testing with this code and everything was looking good until I tried to print to a printer that is using windows sharing from another workstation.

I could print to local printers, and to networked printers without a problem. However when I tried to print to the shared printer, it would print, but I could not change the printer preferences to set duplex or form size or number of copies.

I went back to chicks pdfp program, and what I found was that the original pdfp.exe had the same problem, but the newer pdfp8 program did not. I am still using Acrobat 7 so the changes to detect version 8 were not an issue.

When I compared the pdfp.c files from the original and from pdfp8 there really are very few changes. One change was that a call to HideAdobe immediately after executing the DDE command had been commented out in the original code, but was not commented out in the pdfp8 code.

I added a call to HideAdobe to my Delphi code and now it works for local, networked and shared printers.  So the only problem I am left with is that I don't understand how this call made it work. Why does a call to HideAdobe after the command to print has been sent, cause the printer preference setting to work?

Thanks
Harry

 

chicks wrote: I wasn't aware of the limitation, and was equally unaware that I fixed it! I have no idea why a call to HideAdobe would cause this.

Mystery solved.

It turns out you just happened to have a HideAdobe call commented out in a spot where the routine needs a delay when going to this shared printer.

A simple application.processmessages or a sleep with a reasonable delay will have the same affect as the HideAdobe call.

Do you normally print to Shared windows printers? I'm just wondering if this problem is unique to our network setup, or if this is just something you don't usually do so it's never been a problem.

Thanks
Harry