Saving As PCL from Windows Apps

[rchersin]

Sorry if this is a stupid question....

I pull up Word, or Adobe Pagemaker, or Quark, and create a simple text file such as &quot;This is a test&quot; using plain old Arial font, and save it as PCL. When I look at the resulting PCL, the application has created a &quot;Soft Font&quot; and custom-defined each character I used, instead of generating ordinary PCL commands for the Arial font. Instead of seeing something like &quot;<ESC>(19U<ESC>s16602t3b0s12v1P&quot; to define the symbolset, arial font, bold, 12 point, etc. I get <ESC>*cxxE and <ESC>(sxxW commands for each letter. Why does it do this, when I am just using plain Arial font? I need to merge this PCL with code-generated PCL created in the ordinary format, and the Soft Fonts don't mix well with the code-generated PCL.

Thanks.

 

[DansDadUK]

Porbably because the driver you are using does not think that the font you are choosing to use is an internal font on that printer type.
Are you using the correct printer driver for the device you are 'printing' to?
Or it could be a driver setting (&quot;download Truetype ...&quot?

 

[rchersin]

Thanks so much, you were exactly right! I assumed all printers would have the Arial font in them, but my printer only recognized Courier. It works fine when I have a different printer and driver.

 

[Buff1]

What is happening is that windows is creating a PCL file
but it's in raster graphics. That's what windows seems to
do for most printers. I mean for epson compatible printers
it will make epson compatible graphics which will vary as
to what the resolution of the printer is. With HP, it can be 150,300,600,1200 dpi i think. But anyway, that's what it is doing -- using raster graphics.

 

[DansDadUK]

The PCL file is not (in this case) using raster graphics (at least, not for the text as described).
The presence of the <ESC>*cxxE and <ESC>(sxxW commands for each letter indicate that soft fonts are being downloaded.

 

[Buff1]

Oh, you are so correct. Sorry. My fault for not looking closer.

 

[pagetech]

When the number of characters in Arial broke the single-byte (256 chars.) Windows Latin I character set in WIN3.1, it forced Windows to &quot;play safe&quot; and generate temp. download bitmap (or, outline) characters as they are being used in the print stream... instead of just referencing the resident Arial on a PCL5e printer.

Arial now has 1,300 characters, so the driver needs to manage the fonts for the possibility that you may create a document that used more than one language in the same font and go beyond the 256 character limit of a single-byte character set. The printer resident Arial doesn't have 1,300 characters in it's symbol set... so, the driver doesn't take any chances and downloads every character.

Pick UNIVERS or CG TIMES, for what you want to do. Or, you can use PCLTool (

http://www.pcltools.com)

to convert the PCL into TIFF, then use TIFF2PCL to convert the TIFF into a PCL overlay macro. It's a quick way to create overlays. Yes, they'll be all raster, but PCL coming from a Windows temp. printstream is not very efficient either and not meant to be kludged into a overlay.

Regards,
Bob Pooley

http://www.pcltools.com