Printer Command Language, more commonly referred to as PCL, is a Page description language A page description language is a language that describes the appearance of a printed page in a higher level than an actual output bitmap. An overlapping term is printer control language, but it should not be confused as referring solely to Hewlett-Packard's PCL. PostScript, one of the most noted page description languages, is a fully fledged (PDL) developed by HP Hewlett-Packard Company , commonly referred to as HP, is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA. HP is one of the world's largest information technology companies and operates in nearly every country. HP specializes in developing and manufacturing computing, data storage, and as a printer In computing, a printer is a peripheral which produces a hard copy of documents stored in electronic form, usually on physical print media such as paper or transparencies. Many printers are primarily used as local peripherals, and are attached by a printer cable or, in most newer printers, a USB cable to a computer which serves as a document protocol and has become a de facto De facto is a Latin expression that means "by [the] fact". In law, it is meant to mean "in practice but not necessarily ordained by law" or "in practice or actuality, but without being officially established". It is commonly used in contrast to de jure when referring to matters of law, governance, or technique (such industry standard. Originally developed for early inkjet An inkjet printer is a type of computer printer that reproduces a digital image by propelling variably-sized droplets of liquid material onto a page. Inkjet printers are the most common type of printer and range from small inexpensive consumer models to very large and expensive professional machines printers in 1984, PCL has been released in varying levels for thermal A thermal printer produces a printed image by selectively heating coated thermochromic paper, or thermal paper as it is commonly known, when the paper passes over the thermal print head. The coating turns black in the areas where it is heated, producing an image. Two-color direct thermal printers are capable of printing both black and an, matrix printer Typically the dot matrix is used in older computer printers and many digital display devices. In printers, the dots are usually the darkened areas of the paper. In displays, the dots may light up, as in an LED or CRT display, or darken, as in an LCD, however multicolour LCDs are sometimes initially dark and light up, and page A laser printer is a common type of computer printer that rapidly produces high quality text and graphics on plain paper. As with digital photocopiers and multifunction printers , laser printers employ a xerographic printing process but differ from analog photocopiers in that the image is produced by the direct scanning of a laser beam across the printers. HP-GL HPGL, sometimes hyphenated as HP-GL, is the primary printer control language used by Hewlett-Packard plotters. The name is an initialism for Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language. It later became a standard for almost all plotters. Hewlett-Packard's printers also usually support HPGL in addition to PCL and PJL are supported by later versions of PCL.

PCL is occasionally and incorrectly said to be an abbreviation for Printer Control Language which actually is another term for Page description language A page description language is a language that describes the appearance of a printed page in a higher level than an actual output bitmap. An overlapping term is printer control language, but it should not be confused as referring solely to Hewlett-Packard's PCL. PostScript, one of the most noted page description languages, is a fully fledged.

PCL has been criticized for having less error tolerance than the competing PostScript PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. PostScript is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas printing language. PCL errors are especially common with PCL 6 hardware and drivers.

Contents

PCL levels 1 through 5 overview

PCL levels 1 through 5e/5c are command based languages using control sequences that are processed and interpreted in the order they are received. At a consumer level, PCL data streams are generated by a print driver. PCL output can also be easily generated by custom applications.

PCL 6 overview

PCL 6 was introduced around 1995, and consists of:

PCL 6 Enhanced features a new modular architecture that can be easily modified for future HP printers; faster return to application; faster printing of complex graphics; more efficient data streams for reduced network traffic; better WYSIWYG WYSIWYG , is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed during editing appears very similar to the final output, which might be a printed document, web page, slide presentation or even the lighting for a theatrical event.[clarification needed] printing; improved print quality; and complete backward compatibility. In early implementations, HP did not market PCL 6 well, thus causing quite a bit of confusion in terminology. PCL XL was renamed to PCL 6 Enhanced, but many third party products still use the older term. Some products may claim to be PCL 6 compliant, but may not include the PCL 5 backward compatibility. PCL 6 Enhanced is primarily generated by the printer drivers In computers, a printer driver or a print processor is a piece of software that converts the data to be printed to the form specific to a printer. The purpose of printer drivers is to allow applications to do printing without being aware of the technical details of each printer model under Windows Microsoft Windows is a series of software operating systems and graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Microsoft first introduced an operating environment named Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal and CUPS CUPS , a modular printing system for Unix-like computer operating systems, allows a computer to act as a print server. A computer running CUPS is a host that can accept print jobs from client computers, process them, and send them to the appropriate printer. Due to its structure and compression methodology, it is rarely used by custom applications.

PCL 6 Enhanced is a stack-based, object-oriented protocol, similar to PostScript PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. PostScript is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. However, it is restricted to binary encoding as opposed to PostScript, which can be sent either as binary code or as plain text. The plain-text commands and code examples shown in the PCL programming documentation are meant to be compiled with a utility like HP's JetASM before being sent to a printer. Perhaps because PCL 6 is designed for small size, operators are not as flexible or orthogonal as in PostScript.

PCL 6 Enhanced is designed to match the drawing model of Windows GDI The Graphics Device Interface is a Microsoft Windows application programming interface and core operating system component responsible for representing graphical objects and transmitting them to output devices such as monitors and printers. In this way, the Windows printer driver simply passes through GDI commands with very little modification, leading to faster return-to-application times. Microsoft has extended this concept with its next-generation XPS format, and printer implementations of XPS are being developed. This is not a new idea: it is comparable with Display Postscript and Apple's Quartz, and is in contrast to "GDI Printers" which send the printer a compressed bitmap.

PCL 6 class revisions

Class 1.1

Class 2.0

Class 2.1

Class 3.0

PJL overview

Main article: Printer Job Language

PJL (Printer Job Language) was introduced on the HP LaserJet IIIsi. PJL adds job level controls, such as printer language switching, job separation, environment commands, status readback, device attendance and file system commands.

See also

External links

Categories: Hewlett-Packard | Page description languages

 

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