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

Thanks for confirming what I thought was the case. I wasn’t asking for myself; I made a Windows “wrapper” for pcl6 and someone asked me if it was possible to adapt it to use a barcode font in the same way they use the font with a real printer. I’ll probably just offer to build a version of pcl6 that includes the barcode font along with the standard 80; I already know how to add monospace fonts to the existing set so it shouldn’t be hard. (Adding proportional-spaced fonts is something I’m still trying to figure out; the numbers in the font descriptors in plftable.h aren’t documented, as far as I can tell!)

Thanks again!

Edward Mendelson
Contributing Editor
PC Magazine/PCMag.com



> On Jan 21, 2015, at 10:33 AM, Ken Sharp <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 


_______________________________________________
gs-devel mailing list
[email protected]
http://ghostscript.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gs-devel