Detecting the Presence of a printer

[daleman]

I have an application in which I need to print directly to a dot matrix printer (for speed) , and this works fine, except that I can think of no way to test if a printer is actually present before aiming the print stream at it - if it is not present, the thread simply blocks!

What I am thinking of is some way i can "ping" a printer like one would a node on a network - any ideas???
I treat all printers as an Epson fx80, which should simplify things somewhat

[daleman]

No ideas??