Switching symbol sets in PCL5 printers

[Jim Asman]

--------------- Original Message ---------------
At 08:32P Mon Feb 27 2006, William James McEachran wrote:

> I'm missing something here.
> I've got to print a small string with the "OCR-A" symbol set.

But OCR-A is a FONT as far as I know. Specifically, which printer
are we dealing with. What are you expecting to happen with a symbol
set change?

Now, an OCR-A font may very well require a specific symbol set, but
I have a feeling there are other forces at work here.

> I've got this defined on my print table as
> 
> $1b (0O
> 
> Nothing happens. No change when the code is encountered.
> 
> I then tried using the pre-defined codes for changing the
> character sets (print codes 24, 25, 26 in most of the hp print code
> tables) and again nothing happened.  The character sets didn't change.

There is no guarantee that a given font supports the symbol set
you want. Typical HP Laser fonts are 600+ character, so they support
many symbol sets.
> 
> I confirmed that the printer received the print codes (by issuing the
> printer command "$1b &s0C $1b Y" -- this causes the commands to be printed
> instead of intepreted, cool).  I'm trying this with an all-in-one HP product
> which respects all the other PCL5 commands.  I also tried with 'pcl6' and
> got the same results.
> 
> Question: Beyond issuing the character set command is there an additional
> step required to effect the output produced?
> 

What effect?




Jim 
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