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Printstream PCL to text
- Thread starter EricIT
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The print stream will probably contain data formatted using a particular Page Description Language (PDL).
Typical PDLs are PCL5, PCL6 (also known as PCL XL) and PostScript, although others also exist (e.g. Esc/P, PCL3GUI).
If you just want to view what the printed page would look like, companies like SwiftView and PageTech and Lincoln offer 'PCL viewers'.
For PostScript, there is a 'GhostScript' product, which may do the same (I think there is also a 'GhostPCL' product).
Most of these companies/products offer features to extract just the text (not graphics) from the print stream.
Typical PDLs are PCL5, PCL6 (also known as PCL XL) and PostScript, although others also exist (e.g. Esc/P, PCL3GUI).
If you just want to view what the printed page would look like, companies like SwiftView and PageTech and Lincoln offer 'PCL viewers'.
For PostScript, there is a 'GhostScript' product, which may do the same (I think there is also a 'GhostPCL' product).
Most of these companies/products offer features to extract just the text (not graphics) from the print stream.
The generic text-only (tty) driver can be useful if the document being printed is not too complex (many varying fonts, point sizes, columns, text blocks within columns, double-byte/foreign languages, etc.).
We have a PCLMagic driver that captures all the text from the application in Unicode and UTF8 character cell assignments. The text is hidden in the HP PCL print stream produced by embedding it into macros that are not executed. We then have tools to extract the text and format it in various ways: ASCII Text Equivalent, each text object with it's absolute positioning coordinates, etc.
The PCLMagic driver is automatically installed in our PCLTool SDK Demo at pagetech.com. After it's installed, print to the PageTech PCL2PDF Driver and then look in our \program data\pagetech\pcltsdk_116\out folder for the *.txt file created.
Regards,
Bob Pooley
We have a PCLMagic driver that captures all the text from the application in Unicode and UTF8 character cell assignments. The text is hidden in the HP PCL print stream produced by embedding it into macros that are not executed. We then have tools to extract the text and format it in various ways: ASCII Text Equivalent, each text object with it's absolute positioning coordinates, etc.
The PCLMagic driver is automatically installed in our PCLTool SDK Demo at pagetech.com. After it's installed, print to the PageTech PCL2PDF Driver and then look in our \program data\pagetech\pcltsdk_116\out folder for the *.txt file created.
Regards,
Bob Pooley
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