Ventura Publisher 2.0 printer driver for modern PCL printer

[Jonathan Berry]

In June, I started this thread

http://groups.google.com/group/comp...en&lnk=st&q="jonathan+Berry"#6f115bcb88c891bb
"Looking for new printer with old HPGL compatibility"

asking about a new printer which would allow me to print out the PCL
printer files produced by DOS-based Xerox Ventura Publisher 2.0.

Thanks for all the knowledge and suggestions. Thanks especially to
Bob Headrick--of course you're right, the HP LJ II was a PCL printer,
not an HPGL printer.

Cheap (host driven) printers such as the LJ 1018 don't understand PCL

I eventually purchased an HP Color Laser Jet 2605dn. This does
colo(u)r nicely enough for my photo needs, and a fine job on old
Ventura Publisher 2.0 files. Although it cost close to $Canadian 500,
it came with toner for 2,000 mono and 2,000 colour pages. It is a
large unit, reminds me of a PT Cruiser, which you may regard as "cool"
or "gross", depending upon your taste and year. It is completely
quiet when not in use, and the software even allowed me to turn off
the "recalibration" feature, so that it does not turn itself on every
two hours, chugging away and wasting toner. My main complaint is that
HP forced me to install IE before it would install the printer
drivers.

However, I noticed that it still does not do white print on a dark
background, nor does it print colour fonts. I am referring only to
Ventura Publisher 2 here. So I'm wondering ...

Is there a Ventura Publisher printer driver that will provide those
capabilities? I realize that Ventura Publisher 2 is over fifteen
years old and no manufacturer would make a driver for it. However,
since the PCL to LJ II driver works fine, perhaps there is another
driver which will retain those qualities but do even better. The
2605dn says that it speaks PCL6 (and I think also PCL 5 and 4).

In ye olde days, there was software called "Publisher's Powerpak" from
Atech Software, but I think that's history for over a decade. PP
would
provide Ventura drivers (well, the Ventura version would!) for
unsupported
printers, and support added features for some already-supported
printers.
I kind of regret not hearing about it in 1991.

Thanks also for links to GhostPCL, and also to PrintFile, which is
what I use to print the print-to-file VP 2 files. VP 2 is expecting a
parallel printer, it would not come even close to understanding what a
network printer is.

 

[Jonathan Berry]

Sorry for replying to my own first. It was actually the freeware
PCLReader which I used to show the printer files on my computer
screen, not GhostPCL. It works very well. There is a pay version
with more features. The expire-ware SWIFT is also very good and I
miss its full pixel-for-pixel screen representation. But the SWIFT
full packages are
very expensive, for a home user.

One more datapoint: it is the Ventura HP LJ II printer driver which
makes the various
features of Ventura not be visible, as demonstrated in CAPABILI.CHP.
There's nothing wrong with the 2605dn printer. So basically I need a
Xerox Ventura 2.0 driver for a more advanced PCL (higher compatibility
level?) than HP LJ II.

TIA

 

[tcfs1et02]

asking about a new printer which would allow me to print out the PCL
printer files produced by DOS-based Xerox Ventura Publisher 2.0.

I sent you an email, perhaps it looked like spam.

Anyway, I'm curious as to why you want to use PCL. Ventura GEM has a
PostScript driver and prints to a PS printer (including your HP
2605dn) or file, and that can be distilled to PDF -- I do this all the
time. Once in PDF, you can interact with the rest of the DTP world.

PCL is an orphan format, the utilities to use it are few and mostly
expensive.
Though it allowed some useful things I did long ago to customise an
accounting program output, I would never choose to use it for DTP.

Do you perhaps have some PCL graphics you have to use? PCL bitmap
fonts (which is all I think VP2/3 can use) can be easily replaced by
higher quality Type 1 outline fonts when using the PS driver.

 

[Andrew Hamilton]

PCL is an orphan format, the utilities to use it are few and mostly
expensive.

So why did my Samsung 2150 come with PCL? It also came with PS3,
which is what I normally use.

 

[tcfs1et02]

So why did my Samsung 2150 come with PCL? It also came with PS3,
which is what I normally use.

The question relates to Ventura, and DTP, not office printing, where
PCL is better than being stuck with a proprietary printer language
that means you have to throw away your printer when you upgrade your
OS,

I'm sure it's very efficient. I might use PCL if I was outputting a
lot of bitmaps, PostScript images are rather bloated and so take
larger files and longer times
But not in DTP. Adobe won that battle 15 years ago.

There are uncountable utilities for manipulating PostScript and PDF,
but barely a handful for PCL.

 

[Jonathan Berry]

I sent you an email, perhaps it looked like spam.

I do have a spam filter. If you sent the email less than a week ago,
I can
recover filtered mail from the archive. Otherwise, it is gone.

Anyway, I'm curious as to why you want to use PCL. Ventura GEM has a
PostScript driver and prints to a PS printer (including your HP
2605dn) or file, and that can be distilled to PDF -- I do this all the
time. Once in PDF, you can interact with the rest of the DTP world.

I'm beginning to see that more clearly. The big selling point of
PCLReader is that it can convert PCL documents into PDF. The free
version puts watermarks on pages 11-infinity.

For $10 a month you can get unlimited conversion of documents
to PDF online at Adobe, but PCL is *not* one of the supported source
formats.

PCL is an orphan format, the utilities to use it are few and mostly
expensive.
Though it allowed some useful things I did long ago to customise an
accounting program output, I would never choose to use it for DTP.

Do you perhaps have some PCL graphics you have to use? PCL bitmap
fonts (which is all I think VP2/3 can use) can be easily replaced by
higher quality Type 1 outline fonts when using the PS driver.

That's exactly it. A raster chess font which I designed / coded /
whatever you want to call it. I don't accept that outline fonts are
necessarily
"higher quality" because with raster fonts you can specify where every
dot goes. Total control.

Anyway, I'd be happy to convert my raster chess font to PS, but don't
have the
foggiest idea about how to go about it.

Then I guess the smaller problem is obtaining serif and sans PS fonts
similar to
the raster fonts. I do have the Postscript printer driver set up in
VP2 pro, but
with no fonts... I wonder if the VP PS driver can be made to
recognize or exploit in some way the PS fonts built in to the HP Color
LaserJet 2605dn.

It's definitely a retro thrill to be working in Xerox Ventura
Publisher 2 again.

Thanks for your help!