Following on to the original point that I think prompted this thread was the introduction of PCL6 by HP for their printers. As in the subject heading it was about printing from *nix. In my case AIX, but the same will apply to Linux and any other flavour ox *nix.
We don't have Windows printer drivers. In my experience we pass the PCL5 escape sequences directly to the spooler. This is similar to Bob's example below in using RAW in Windows. The printer receives the escape sequences untouched by any driver file and acts upon the command string received. (e.g Bold On; Print in 12 cpi or whatever). My original question was about PCL6 being totally different to PCL5 and a lot of the new printers are not backwards compatible (and the ones that are are often only partially compatible working on a subset of PCL5). Consequently the new breed of PCL6 printers do not know how to work with PCL escape sequences. PCL6 is more akin to GDI in that it is graphical and not character based. Unless I am missing something here a lot of prints out there will suddenly stop working when PCL5 printers are replaced with PCL6 printers. We have alredy seen this and there doesn't appear to be an easy fix. Has anyone else experienced this in the Unix world (N.B. it will also be a problem in the Windows world if you have print routines that use PCL5 escape sequences (e.g. SB+)). By the way, the SETPTR command on *nix platforms doesn't have the GDI or RAW options. Robin Smith Reflex Data Systems Ltd Tel: 01482 881152 On Wed, 4 Jun 2008, Robin Smith wrote: >The problem is more fundamental as I see it. HP "in their infinite wisdom" have dropped PCL5 in favour of PCL6. This is >fine if you are on Windows using the correct Windows printer drivers. However, if you live in the real world like a lot >of us in the U2 arena and work on a flavour of Unix (AIX, HP, Linux etc) then we don't have Windows printer drivers.> > >Also, if you use PCL5 escape sequences to format yur printing - this is how SB+ printing works - PCL6 doesn't understand >the sequences. We have found that some HP printers that use PCL6 emulation "claim" to be backwards compatible to PCL5. >BEWARE - this is often a very reduced version of PCL5 with only one or two fonts/typefaces supported and a reduced set of >escape sequences. > >Also, if you use PCL5 sequences in the MS Windows environment (again SB+ does this) then the Windows PCL6 drivers don't >recognise them. > >PCL6 is very similar to GDI using a graphical interface to the printers rather than ASCII characters that we are all used >to. > >I have already logged a call with U2 support to get their take on this. > >Robin Smith >Reflex Data Systems Ltd Scanned by MailDefender - managed email security from intY - www.maildefender.net ------- u2-users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
