Hal read parport

Went through the .hal tutorials, and I think that I have the basic idea. But I cannot seem to link a parport pin to a thread to display the signal input on the halscope. Can someone help me do this?

What I did:
Tried various configurations from here:
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.4/html/hal_parallel_port.html

and combined with this tutorial:
linuxcnc.org/docs/html/hal/tutorial.html

I am trying to display an encoder input from a spindle encoder on the halscope. I want to eventually do closed loop control for my spindle, but I am having a hard time figuring out the steps to make this happen. I am not well versed in hal, so I am hoping learning this will help everything else make sense and aid in troubleshooting. This is for a hobby cnc machine, ran by a g540 and using version 2.6.5 emc2. thanks in advance for any help.