PCL Editor

[delira7]

Is there a way to edit a PCL macro in a "word" type editor? I have a PCL macro, but the form from which it was created is gone and modifications need to be made.

 

[jlasman]

PCL files are moslty ASCII text, so many text editors
will work There is a public domain text editor called
"vim" that is widely available over the internet. It
has a binary mode that is one of several features that
make it ideal for this purpose.

Of course, how successful you are with it will depend on
the nature of the existing macro. Certainly, if the macro
is a bitmap image, a text editor isn't much use. Otherwise,
you should be able to do what you need. I generally write
all my macros from scratch using vim.

Jim Asman

 

[delira7]

Thanks for your response, but I was hoping for a graphic editor solution. Some way of taking the PCL code and converting it back to a word template. So I can modify it graphically, given that I don't know PCL. Is this possible at all?

 

[jlasman]

OK, so we are really talking about a WORD macro and
not a PCL macro. What you have is the PCL code generated
by the WORD macro.

I would doubt very much if there is ANY software out
there that is going to reverse engineer PCL code into
a WORD macro. Consider that the PCL code is totally
dependant on the printer driver that created it. Heck,
the driver may have done nothing other than generate
a bitmap of the entire page.

There are a number of PCL viewers out there, and many
if not most of them can have problems is accurately
displaying PCL code. I use a viewer called Swiftview,
and it has a mechanism to convert PCL to a TIFF file
that could the be edited in a "paint" program, but that
is hardly what you are after.

My sense is that you should bite the bullet and re-create
the macro(s) from scratch. If you already have a model to
follow, it probably doesn't take as long as you might
think.

Jim Asman