Below are the relevant parts of a program for printing to my PC printer. I am running Windows 10 and Visual Studio. The program prints the "howdy" line, but if don't call  "PC_PRINTER_REDIRECTION_PROC"  the printer does not print "howdy"

I thought the main purpose of the "PC_PRINTER_REDIRECTION_PROC" call was so you could get the printer handle and do things like set the font - have not seen anything saying that you have to do the call. What am I missing?

I can comment out the call to set the font in "SetFont" and it still prints.

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    Select PrintFile assign to printer
            organization is line sequential
            file status is file-status.

    FD PrintFile.
    01 PrintRec pic x(80).

     set user-func to entry "SetFont".

     call "PC_PRINTER_REDIRECTION_PROC"
            using by value flags
            user-func
           end-call.

    open output PrintFile.

    move 'howdy' to PrintRec.
    write PrintRec after advancing 0 lines.
    close PrintFile.

entry "SetFont" using by value printer-handle.
                call "PC_PRINTER_SET_FONT"
                    using printer-handle
                                   font-family-name
                                   by value font-size
                                   by value font-style
                     returning status-code
                 end-call.
    exit program returning status-code.

Hi,

By default,  when you write to a file using 'assign to printer' the COBOL run-time system will attempt to write to the LPT1 device. If you don't have a printer assigned to LPT1 nothing will be written, which sounds like what you are describing.

When PC_PRINTER_REDIRECTION_PROC is used the writes are redirected to the default printer via the Windows print spooler service rather than being written directly to a device.

I hope that helps.

Gael