I have used the print to file command before but have never been able to open the file properly. When using this command you always get a .PRN file as the output, but there does not appear to be any program that can read a .prn file extension. If you do manage to open the file in a program such as text editor all you see is a whole lot of insignificant binary code.

My question is this. If this is a world of logic and I hope it is. The people who gave us the option to print to a file instead of the printer certainly wanted us to be able to view that output and use it just as we would the physical output of a printer whether the input was text or graphics. So how the heck do you do it??? I mean come on man! If I print a picture to a .prn file, I want to see a picture when I open it, not binary code.
If someone could tell me what program is designed to handle the .prn file, or how the heck you are supposed to use them, I would be ever so grateful.

The PRN file is, by definition, a file of the text etc. that is in to-be-used-by-a-printer format! It's a way to store a printable output file so you can transport it or store it for later printing. Why do you need to "see" what the material looks like in PRN format?? You saw what it looks like in whatever application you used to create the material from which the PRN file was created!
And THAT is all logical!

Hi, Vaughn, One use is making PDF documents without paying $600 for Adobe Acrobat. It's done by Installing a Postscript printer driver, even if you have no such printer. Then you print to file, and the file is a Postscript document. (with a .prn extension, which you can change if you want.) Then you build that doc into a PDF document with freeware from here:

http://www.webxd.com/zipguy/indexbig.htm

You can put in colored pictures, etc.
Have fun.
Jim

And if you want to view the Postscript doc, there are lots of postscript readers such as Ghostscript which you can download. In fact Ghostscript is the engine behind the above PDF process.