existence of "pcl2text"??

[Peter L. Peres]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Henry Spencer wrote:

> On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Peter L. Peres wrote:
> > > Does anyone know whether a "pcl2text" utility exists? ...
> >
> > There is no such thing. PCL does not include any text characters if the
> > printout was graphical.
>
> And the same is true of PostScript, but nevertheless it is *usually*
> possible to extract the text from PostScript.  Most PCL output has text
> as characters, not as graphics.

Maybe but not the one I saw. Since PCL cannot download fonts (it can
download bitmaps and use them as tiles I think but only some versions) it
can only use plain text for fonts available in the printer, usually one of
four fonts in a number of variants. Post Script is different because the
font set for Post Script is standard and infinitely scalable (vector fonts
rendered at the desired resolution by the print engine).

Most inexpensive PCL printers do not send any text to the printer in a
graphic print-out, with the exception of control codes (most PCL control
codes are printable ASCII sequences). When a PCL printer is used to print
plain text with the printer default font then the sent data is indeed
plain text with a small set of control commands in PCL at the start and
end. If there is any text in a PCL file to be seen then

  strings <file.pcl|less

should show it.

Peter
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