Switching symbol sets in PCL5 printers

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Thu, 2 Mar 2006, William James McEachran wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 08:32:52PM -0500, William James McEachran wrote:
>
> My thanks to Jim Asman, Bob Rasmussen, and a private poster who brought me
> up to speed on character sets and fonts.

Bill's questions caused me to revisit and then enhance some features.
Details follow.

Bill is using AnzioWin, taking advantage of the built-in Print Wizard
engine. These comments apply also to the freestanding Print Wizard
program. Some of what's described is pre-release.

Print Wizard includes a "translate PCL" feature. When turned on, it will
parse through PCL, HPGL, and PJL, and render that output on any
Windows-supported printer (including Windows-only printers), or generate
PDFs or faxes. This translation, although never 100% complete, is very
thorough, including support for bitmaps, color, macros, vector drawing,
character shading, paper size selection, embedded Truetype fonts, and
more.

It also includes support for the "Barcodes and more" cartridge from HP,
which has fonts for certain barcodes, a linedraw font, and OCR A and B.

Bill is now using the OCR A support, and driving it with PCL codes coming
from filePro. When Print Wizard sees a request for OCR A, it will use one
of several available OCR A fonts for Windows. Our preference is for one
from Adobe ($29), primarily because of its treatment of some special
characters that are used mostly in Europe, such as the "OCR chair".

We've also been refining our PCL translation for some other filePro users
who were making some pretty creative use of it for drawing floor plans of
houses!

An alternative to PCL is to send Print Wizard Markup Language (PWML),
which can also specify various fonts, sizes, etc. We provide a
"printwiz.prt" file for filePro that will convert your printcodes to PWML.

If you have PCL or PWML output the Print Wizard won't print properly, just
email it to me and ask "why won't this print right?"

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
 company e-mail: rsi at anzio.com
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