Re: trouble

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Caballero wrote:

> HP does not acknowledge that you can print from DOS, but you can.
> The fundamentals of PCL (HP's printer
> language) must have remained in place all these years, because I can even
> print from my old driver (for HP LJ series II) to the new printer.
> That's using a twelve year old driver on new hardware. I almost couldn't
> believe it.

Unlike a certain very major company I'm not going to mention, HP has not felt
any compelling need to totally revise the rules, every year or two, to the
point where what went before becomes null and void. Successor versions of PCL
appear to have been additive, incorporating the prior version as a subset of
the new page description language. So, you may not be able to tap into the
later features that were introduced, but you won't lose whatever functionality
you had, that the old Xy PRN drivers knew how to operate.

Actually, if you had a tech manual for the printer in question, plus the later
PCL spec documentation -- and given the fact that the Xy PRN files are editable
text, providing one understands how they work -- it should be possible to add
much of the later PCL features. *I* probably couldn't do this, but it can be
done. The limitations are whatever the printer model is capable of doing, and
possibly the size of the PRN file. I think there are file size limits, such
that some things might need to be commented out, in order to enable other
things.

Jordan