PCL oevrlay printing

[krisme]

Hello everyone,

I am trying to store a letterhead as an overlay on to a lexmark Optra Rx(with PCL5 support) and then use it to print further pages.

The letter head has our company logo as header and company name as footer on it. I store this overlay, as a macro, on the printer. I then try printing a simple text line on this overlay by calling the macro. What happens is, the footer, which is text, appears fine, but the header, which is the logo, is printed as some special characters.

Could u pls help me out here.

Thanx in advance.

 

[jlasman]

Have you converted the logo into PCL format or is it still in some kind of image format? It sounds as though you have a corrupt copy of the logo. If you have not converted the logo to PCL, then that is certainly the problem.

Jim Asman

 

[krisme]

I have to admit my ignorance here..I did not know that I had to convert the logo into PCL format..Could u pls tell me how to convert my logo into PCL format ??

 

[jlasman]

Read an earlier thread in the forum here titled something like "embedding an image in a PCL document"

A number of solutions were discussed.

I sell a program called MKPCL designed specifically to produce a PCL file directly from a BMP, PCX, or JPG. It is available for SCO Unix, Linux, and DOS platforms. There are a number of runtime options to modify the image.

Jim Asman
jim@spctra.wimsey.com
jlasman@telus.net

 

[krisme]

I am working on Windows 2000 and so would need something for this platform..any suggestions??i'll look at the thread u mentioned in the meanwhile..thanks a bunch for u'r help..

 

[jlasman]

Some windows imaging programs have a PCL "save as" option. One that comes to mind is Hijaak Express and is quite inexpensive. PCL aside, it is worth having on your system as it can convert just about any image format to any other. Imaging software, though, is not likely to give you an option to make the PCL file a LaserJet macro. I haven't seen one of these that supports PCL compression. Depending on the image, you can get files that compress down to 20% of the original raster size or less.

Another option is to print to a file through your windows printer driver, and then edit the file to create your macro. That would probably involve dropping down to a DOS shell to do the editing. The public domain editor "vim" is very useful for these things. Sometimes this can be simple and other times very obtuse. It depends on the printer driver and the application.

Technically, it makes no difference if you create your logo PCL file from a DOS shell or from a windows application, or for that matter on another computer. It is probably a bigger issue as to how you get your macro to the printer and executed without interference in your windows environment.

Jim Asman