Re: Download PCL (SFP) soft font to pcl6 interpreter?

At 10:09 21/01/2015 -0500, Edward Mendelson wrote:


>Using pcl6 to generate a PDF file, is there any way to download a PCL soft 
>font to the interpreter together with the actual PCL print job so that the 
>interpreter will use the soft font in the same way a physical printer 
>would use a downloaded font? I understand that the font would need to be 
>downloaded before each job, that it wouldn't be persistent.

You can download a soft font embedded in the print job, but as I understand 
it, that's as far as it goes.


>I do know that I can *embed* a font in the PCL stream of a print job (I 
>use that technique when printing from WordPerfect for DOS to pcl6), but I 
>wonder if it's possible to achieve the same thing without embedding the font.

I'm not clear on why you would want to, if you have to 'load' the font 
before each print file, then I don't understand what you would gain over 
just embedding the font anyway.


>  I suppose I'm asking if there's already a command-line switch that would 
> look something like
>
>-download fontname.sfp

If the font is a properly constructed, downloadable, PCL font then 
presumably you could simply concatenate it on the front of the intended PCL 
job.

However, any kind of 'reset' would defeat that, clearly.

How would you intend that your PCL job would reference the font ? By name ? 
If so you could simply add the font to the font list. I'm not certain how 
(or if) that can be done for *PCL* fonts, I'm reasonably sure it can be 
done for TrueType fonts.

Bearing in mind I know very little about PCL.....


>Thanks for any help, though my guess is that the answer will simply be, 
>"Sorry, can't be done."

It certainly can't be done at present. Maybe if you described why you want 
this it might be possible to come up with an alternative solution.


                         Ken