Tim and Don:
This has become an informative thread, and I thank one and
all for their
corrections and additions.
> ...I perused said manual years ago. My
> recollection was that it contained commands for
placement of text, selection
> of fonts, etc., which are page description commands.
"Selection of fonts." Back in the early days at
least, the only fonts
that could be selected under PCL were those installed in the
printer
itself or included in a font cartridge inserted in the
printer. I had
several of the latter. I seem to remember that the method
made the font
in the document and the font on the printed page independent
entities.
You could print proportional fonts when your old computer
didn't support
the display of them much as you could print proportionally
on a daisy
wheel printer from old versions of DEC's word processor
which, at the
time, didn't have a graphic display or the capability of
accounting for
line endings on screen when a proportional font was used. In
any case,
there seemed to be no way of embedding a font in the output
file. You
had to have the right cartridges in place. Even if I'm wrong
about that
extreme example, the font you got was HP's or a
third-party's version of
the font, not necessarily the one loaded on your computer,
and there can
be significant differences between fonts with the same name
and design
from different type houses. Thus, unlike PostScript, it was
not a truly
portable page description language. (I do realize that there
are
"standard" fonts built into PostScript printers as
well. PDF's can
ignore those inbuilt fonts, and I presume the same is true
of
PostScript. It was not possible with PCL at that time.) Can
PCL embed
fonts? Nothing I've read in the thread seems to indicate
that it can.
> ...you can tell that in fact
> PCL sends a description of the page because 1) there
are built in fonts, 2)
> you can get additional printer font cards, and 3) there
is font substitution
> at the printer level instead of just at the driver
level....
>
> ...I would consider any
> language that provides for setting graphics and text at
a page level a page
> description language. It does not need to have flow
control statements (such
> as if/else) to do so.
>
I can sort of follow the logic of this but, even after
reading all the
capabilities of PCL in these posts, something inside me
rebels at the
notion of calling both "page description
languages." As you say, it's a
question of semantics. But lumping these two together seems
to lead to
more confusion than enlightenment.
HB
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