pcl 5e commands

[Rebecca Riehm]

We have a couple of HP 4200dtn laser printers to which we would like to be
able to print 6-up reports to save paper. The windows driver lets you set
this parameter, but we are printing from business BASIC running on a unix
platform. We wanted to use PCL 5e commands to control printing from within
our programs, but there is no Pages Per Sheet command listed in the PCL 5
reference provided by HP.

Anyone have any ideas on how to do this?

 

[Alan]

We have a couple of HP 4200dtn laser printers to which we would like to be
able to print 6-up reports to save paper. The windows driver lets you set
this parameter, but we are printing from business BASIC running on a unix
platform. We wanted to use PCL 5e commands to control printing from within
our programs, but there is no Pages Per Sheet command listed in the PCL 5
reference provided by HP.

Anyone have any ideas on how to do this?

Possibly it's a PJL command, which is what sets the printing
environment for HP printers, but looking through my references I can't
see a pages per sheet or similar command there either.

That printer supports PostScript level 3, and especially with a Unix
system, you'd be much better using PS than PCL. In PS it's a single
command, but I don't think it's easy if it's even possible in PCL.
Windows probably does it by treating the page as a graphic and scaling
that.

Unless you've got a big investment in embedded PCL commands, I'd go
that way. Even if your printer didn't have native PS, Unix uses
GhostScript to emulate it on other printers, so it's not hardware
dependent.

 

[Davide Guolo]

Dear Mrs. Rebecca Riehm,

The windows driver lets you set
this parameter, but we are printing from business BASIC running on a unix
platform.

by looking at your problem from a different point of view, if a portion of
the Unix filesystem is shared to the Windows network (by SCO-VisionFS, Samba
or similar products), you may want to have a look at Printfil, which can
allow your *nix applications to print to any Windows printer, by using the
Windows driver (and all their available settings)

More info and a free trial is available for download at our web site.

Kind regards,
Davide Guolo
--------------------------------------------------------------
Printfil - Windows Printing System for Applications
http://www.guolo.com/printfil
Odbc4All - Connection to ODBC Data Sources for any Application
http://www.guolo.com/odbc4all
--------------------------------------------------------------

 

[Rebecca Riehm]

It looks like using Postscript would be one way to achieve this. The reports
we want to 6-up are hundreds of pages long. We are concerned that converting
these text files to Postscript and then 6-up will be very slow.

 

[Alan]

It looks like using Postscript would be one way to achieve this. The reports
we want to 6-up are hundreds of pages long. We are concerned that converting
these text files to Postscript and then 6-up will be very slow.

I wouldn't worry about that. I used to do DTP on a 286 PC. It
generated PS print files for 400 page books in a few seconds, much
faster than the printer could print them; almost surely more complex
than what you're doing.

If you have a Unix system surely you have a sysadmin -- ask him about
how to send your reports through lpr via filters like text2ps or
similar to convert plain text to ps, then psnup to do your 6-up
formatting.