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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-17T00:38:32+00:00

Is there a way in Windows (which works in Windows CE) to check if

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Is there a way in Windows (which works in Windows CE) to check if a printer is attached and communicating to LPT1 in C++?

[Edit] More info:

We are currently working with a generic Windows CE printer driver – pcl.dll – by passing it into CreateDC, to get the DC for the printer.

We can’t call PrintDlg() to show the print dialog because it is “too complicated looking,” but we also can’t call it with PD_RETURNDEFAULT because we do not want to use the default printer. So, we are manually setting up a DEVMODE structure to pass in to CreateDC.

After we have the DC, we call GetDeviceCaps() to get the info for the printer (such as page-width, etc), then StartPage()/EndPage()/ExtTextOut() to print.

However, if there is no printer attached, the program freezes for about a minute before giving an “Abort/retry/fail?” dialog (I don’t know what point in this process it is freezing). Other software doesn’t freeze when you attempt to print, so there must be a way of preventing this…

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I would also recommend enumerating devices, but you could try the following functions to see if it hangs quickly and gracefully (I don’t currently have any way of testing this…):

    CreateFile("LPT1:", 0, 0, NULL, OPEN_EXISTING, ...);
DeviceIOControl(HANDLE, IOCTL_PARALLEL_STATUS, ...);

    It is possible that this returns a failure better than trying to print with the DC.
    If it works, don’t forget to call CloseHandle() on the HANDLE returned from CreateFile before opening your DC for printing.

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