Thanks for the information. I will have to study up on Postscript. In general, are most printers postscript capable, if that's the term. Also, can you mix PCL code with Postscript? I think the client adds PCL code within the print stream to bold or underline certain words in a printed report.
-----Original Message----- From: The IBM z/VM Operating System [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Boyes Sent: November 15, 2006 12:03 PM To: IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU Subject: Re: Question on PCL & LPR printers > Sometimes the client asks for the characters to be bigger but I explain that for a fixed > font I cannot specify a point size when specifying PCL code. I know in Microsoft Word, I > can specify, for example, Courier font and can choose a different point size. Well, you can specify it in the PCL string, but you probably won't like the outcome. The printer will pick the closest built-in font that it possesses, which may not be a good choice. The reason it works with Word is that if the font is not built into the printer driver, Microsoft switches to graphics mode in the printer and draws the characters directly, or creates downloadable font glyphs on-demand for what it prints. If you force it to use only the printer fonts, you'll get the same result in Word. > I have not looked into defining any printers as postscript printers. Would it make any > difference in the flexibility with regards to the size of the characters that are printed or > other capabilities that can not be obtained with prefix PCL coding? Postscript would allow you a *great deal* more flexibility. PostScript permits arbitrary font scaling, much smarter imaging, and in general is a better deal all around. Use PostScript whenever possible. You may want to look into driving your PCL-only printers behind a outboard Linux box running CUPS, and feeding RSCS output to the Linux box for preprocessing. CUPS provides the ability to transcode PostScript to PCL (using GhostScript, a software PostScript interpreter, on the Intel box), which would provide the PCL-only printers equivalent function to a printer with inboard PostScript. You *really* don't want to do this function on the zSeries -- PostScript imaging is CPU-bound and it eats resources like crazy -- but a spare Pentium 200 makes a really nice imaging server and you get a enormous improvement in printing capability for a small investment.
