[lug] Post Script to PCL

Tkil tkil at scrye.com
Mon Dec 4 23:08:16 MST 2000


PCL is a dumb dumb dumb page description language.  it can do pattern
fills and maybe rules, and that's mostly it.  (PCL5+ might have added
some things, but it's still a very far cry from PostScript.)

so, if you need to convert PostScript to PCL, you *have* to use some
sort of PostScript rasterizer -- of which Ghostscript is pretty high
quality, easily available, and fairly well supported.

on the other hand, if you have some other source format (e.g. LaTeX,
*roff, SGML, etc), you might be able to find better conversions than
taking a detour through PostScript first.

so, if you only have PostScript, you're stuck with using some form of
PostScript interpreter (and since the licenses from adobe are a couple
hundred each, GhostScript is a pretty good deal.  :)  if you have some
other source format, there might be more options available (e.g. DVI
directly into PCL.)

t.






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