PCL viewer/tester?

Does anybody have a RISC OS viewer/tester/verifier app for HP PCL files? Ghostscript’s gpcl6 isn’t working for me and I don’t know if it’s the issue or if I have broken PCL files. (ghostscript 9.26 from riscosports)

tldr: I’m messing around with cawf, an old nroff clone. It can generate various printer-ready files, including laserjet3 (ie PCL). But gpcl is failing on them and I don’t know where the problem is.

I can turn cawf’s epson printout into postscript or pdf via epson2ps + ghostscript, but I think pcl2ps might be better.

cawf can also generate “acorn” output which is actually First Word Plus files, which Ovation and Writer+ understand. :-)

Success!

It turns out that PCL files need to be CRLF terminated, not just LF terminated like normal RISC OS text is.

Ran the PCL file through EOL conversion in stronged and now gpcl works! I can produce ps and pdf from nroff(*)!

(*)at least from nroff source simple enough that cawf can handle it, anyway…

It turns out that PCL files need to be CRLF terminated, not just LF terminated like normal RISC OS text is.

Sort of. A project at work had a problem with only the very top of a page appearing.
This was down to the software authors assuming the printers would have the setting to automatically convert LF to CRLF enabled.

I insisted that the default was NOT enabled and therefore they needed to match the default of the printers by adding the CR in the software.
The alternative was setting the printers in a mode that didn’t match other software sending to the same device.

So – HP printers certainly did have a setting for that.

But you’re right, make the software do the work to match the printer default.

Well, HP used to sell U*NIX (HP-UX) so they should have been familiar with it’s EOL conventions. Glad to see the divisions talked to each other!

gpcl6, however, doesn’t seem to be so tolerant. Maybe. I’ve been distracted today but I’m going to try to track down additional docs for it. What’s included in the ghostscript package seems a little bare…

Well, HP used to sell U*NIX (HP-UX) so they should have been familiar with it’s EOL conventions. Glad to see the divisions talked to each other!

Try reading up on 802.1x support in JetDirect, many people same story:

802.1x doesn’t work properly (enable and the printer drops off the network no matter what settings are in the card for device account and password) so contact HP.

It’s a printer card —> contact printers division – hours on phone until
referral: It’s a network card —> contact HP network support – hours on phone until
referral: It’s a printer card —> contact printers division – hours on phone until
referral: It’s network card…

I have an HP 3630 (I think). Cheap ass inkjet with Instant Ink subscription (so for a fiver a month I can make up to 100 full colour prints; I don’t but what I do do would cost more in ink than the subs).

Sometimes my phone can see it. Sometimes it can’t. Sometimes I have to switch to WiFi Direct.

Jeez. How hard can it be to shove a WiFi dongle into the box and have it “just work”?

for HP PCL files

Question is – what’s a PCL file? There’s about half a dozen or so types, some of them quite incompatible with the others.

Jeez. How hard can it be to shove a WiFi dongle into the box and have it “just work”?

I refer the honourable gentleman to my early missive wrt JetDirect cards and their terminally crappy 802.1x implementation.

and even worse support.

Rick: Well, for my purposes, the PCL understood by the LaserJet 3. From the era when dinosaurs roamed the Earth ;-) and nroff clones were useful and needful.

Really though, cawf speaks such a small core subset that the latest, greatest LaserJet probably accepts it. Assuming PCL hasn’t been abandoned for a more locked down propreitary solution…

Or are you asking about the difference between HP’s old “Printer Control Language” and “Portable Cloud whatever” that google wants to talk about when you google PCL? ;-)

Evil Hacks Mode: cawf’s PCL output does have the problem that gpcl thinks it has 1 line too many per page.

Solution: lj3 specific “device configuration” file for cawf that says that the page size is 8.5×10 inch. blahahahaha!

real solution: (to be done) I think gpcl has cli options about margins…

After much hacking and finally RTFMing I found out how to force gpcl into using LEGAL size paper.

I think I’ll wrap it up in a script and call it done!

Can A4 size also be made an option? We don’t really use Legal in the UK and Europe.

GPCL supports (or should, I haven’t actually tested this) just about every papersize anybody ever shoved into a laserjet. It’s a long list, but does include A4 yes.

cawf doesn’t know about papersize names, it does allow the papersize to be defined, but I would be somewhat surprised if it understands millimeters or more than one digit after the decimal point in inches. When they said it was a subset, they meant it!

The real problem is shown in this screencap:
screen

Same cawf/1 source, same !pdf viewer.
The partially covered window is the result of cawf’s epson output + epson2ps + ps2pdf
The window on top is cawf’s lj3 output + pcl2pdf

as you can see, gpcl rendered the manpage with a much larger font, resulting in the page overflowing the papersize.

Oh wow! PCL font stuff is complicated!!!

And stubborn!

Fortunately I don’t actually have to mess with it! After much experimenting and RTFMing I found a PJL command that sets lines per page. Set it to 66 and cawf’s output started fitting on a LETTER sized page again!

I should have remembered this from the 90’s when I actually had to deal with hardware HP printers, they think that a letter-sized page only fits 60 lines!

(*)Printer Job Language, which controls things like “what paper tray to pull paper from”, “what language the print job is in”, etc. (Steve Pampling) this includes what end-of-line characters it wants but gpcl doesn’t seem to support this variable.:-(

DavidS: I have no idea. I basically live on Dune, so inkjets and ribbon printers dry out almost instantly. I’ve been laser-printer only since the mid 90’s.

Also, according to the Net, HP’s pulling some real scammy stuff with its ink…

Does PCL still work with modern USB HP Inkjet printers?

Yes – a mixture of PJL (to control the jobs) and PCL (to control the printed page). Note, however, that the cheap inkjets are likely to be PCL3GUI which is a subset of PCL, and is pretty much undefined (you’ll find numerous descriptions of PCL commands, but very little about PCL3GUI). Oh and since the host does most of the work and sends everything as a big bitmap, PCL3GUI isn’t exactly compatible with regular PCL.

[source: me, many experiments with my HP 3630 last summer; eventually giving up and using my Samsung laser with RISC OS instead]

Also, according to the Net, HP’s pulling some real scammy stuff with its ink…

Yes and no.

Yes, because the ink cartridges that you can buy in the shops are barely filled. The pricey XL size contains a few drops, and the standard size is barely vapour. I think they claim to print 100 pages, but that’s something like 5% coverage at standard intensity. When translating that to full page photo prints, well, it might be ten if you’re lucky.

Yes, because HP are notorious for pushing in DRM and other features intended to reject clone inks.

No, because let’s face reality, even a basic printer such as my 3630. It’s a printer, a scanner, it has WiFi support (built in web server for setting it up), supports AirPrint, blah blah. I would struggle to believe that the hardware, the packaging, and the firmware design are covered by the thirty quid that I paid for it. Even if the scanner is basic and the print engine seems barely better than the DJ500C of the late ‘90s.
HP’s business model has always been to punt out a printer dirt cheap, and then screw you on the price of the consumables. All the internet rage and mouth foam is from people who haven’t yet sussed this. If you want a printer that can accept “whatever” ink, then buy something else. And be prepared to pay a justified price for the printer.

However… HP have perhaps figured this out, and are willing to exchange certain metrics (such as how often your printer is used, what it is used for, what talks to it and how…) in return for cheaper ink. They run a service called Instant Ink where you can print, say, 100 pages for a fiver a month (and can roll a certain number of pages over, I think 200). This is pages, and they make no distinction between a page of text and a full colour photo print.
So when I need to spit out a few pages of text, I use the laser. When I want to print pictures, I use the inkjet. I printed a few animé posters (A4 size) from publicity artwork to hang on the wall. While output is of dubious quality at plain paper normal (obvious banding), this cheap little printer can get its act together to spit out decent photo prints when it needs to. And for my fiver a month, I could happily do a hundred of them. Which in terms of using purchased ink cartridges could easily cost north of a hundred quid to do the same thing.
When you get your Instant Ink cartridges, you’ll notice that they are MASSIVE. I mean freakishly so. So much, in fact, that the black lasts me a little under two years and the tri-colour 6-8 months. Which kind of rams home the point how much you’re getting screwed on the standard barely-there size cartridges. In fact, my problem with the black instant ink is that the print head technology doesn’t last as long as the ink does. The black is streaky, even after numerous head cleans. Thankfully this only really shows up in normal quality prints. Best quality plain paper overprints to cover these deficiencies, and photo printing overprints in much tinier bands so things look good.

All that said, I miss my Brother DCP-165C. A much more expensive printer (I think it cost about a hundred), it had a decent scanner. A little control panel with buttons and an LCD allowed copies to be tweaked (quality, lighter/darker, etc), the printer using built-in heads had much more finesse over the droplet size (on-cart heads tend to only offer a large and small droplet; built in heads can often vary the droplet size). Oh, and it was happy to run on pretty much anything – even a “bag of 16 replacement cartridges for a tenner”. The ink detection was optical (a little float), and there was no DRM or other such rubbish. It was a nice printer. Sadly one day the magenta stopped working. Completely. Not a dried head, more like an electrical fault. Blown driver? Damaged cable? I don’t know.
The only thing that annoyed me about the Brother is that it conducted a daily cleaning cycle (for some reason, often around 6am!) which would use ink. Which is one of the reasons I used clone ink. Not paying the going price for ink to be wasted. But, on the other hand, I didn’t have to run cleaning cycles that often. The printer took care of itself. The HP? Different story…

(Steve Pampling) this includes what end-of-line characters it wants but gpcl doesn’t seem to support this variable.:-(

I haven’t looked at the hardware settings of one of those things for ages (10-15 years) but there used to be a setting you could choose from the menu panel (finger poke for a while)

Yes, because HP are notorious for pushing in DRM and other features intended to reject clone inks.

At one time HP were famous for producing the most expensive thing on the planet weight for weight.
Put out total bull about how the wrong ink could damage things when the only possible item to be damaged was the print head that was built into the disposable (but refillable) cartridge. So refill until the head died and then get another HP cartridge.

That said, I haven’t printed anything except on-call timesheets for a couple of years and even the timesheets went digital¹ because Covid.

¹ We, in IT, had been submitting printouts of an Excel spreadsheet that only required a monthly amendment for the year/month and all the days auto-marked as weekday or weekend or Bank Holiday, the submission date was “Today” i.e. when you printed it and you had to sign it.
Payroll found out why everything looked uniform and asked for a copy – then issued it to the whole Trust as the only official way of submitting printouts Doh!
They are taking digital copies via departmental managers now – because Covid.
Pretty soon they may figure out that they can import the data from the sheet rather than transcribing it. :) (I don’t think a proper smiley exists for that – unless there’s a Trump & Co version)

when the only possible item to be damaged was the print head that was built into the disposable (but refillable) cartridge

Yeah, Lexmark tried that ruse (I picked up a freebie Lexmark printer a long time ago). There was a ‘feature’ where removing and reinserting a cartridge would ask (via the driver) if it was a new one and if you said yes the levels would be reset. So I used to refill the cartridges until the heads gave up. And all the dire warnings? Well, I’m chucking that head out so, uh, what’s the issue exactly?

So refill until the head died and then get another HP cartridge.

The fun of the DeskJet 500. Doubly so because it used some sort of weird gravity fed system (if the seal isn’t good, it’ll pee the ink all over the inside of the printer) and also because the printer’s preferred method of waking up the cartridge appeared to be slamming the print mechanism into the end stop. Twice. (that’s the two loud clanks you hear when powering it up)

IIRC, it was a 16MHz Z80 clone running that thing. Hmmm!

I don’t think a proper smiley exists for that

Facepalm girl sounds appropriate.

There was a ‘feature’ where removing and reinserting a cartridge would ask (via the driver) if it was a new one and if you said yes the levels would be reset. So I used to refill the cartridges until the heads gave up.

I did get told how many bottles of Quink went through one users printer (she kept count) but I do remember her telling me that when the printer finally got swapped out for a laser she still had part of the 4 pack of cartridges left.

The fun of the DeskJet 500. Doubly so because it used some sort of weird gravity fed system (if the seal isn’t good, it’ll pee the ink all over the inside of the printer)

You need to use a nice fine needle, like you might find in a hospital.

Facepalm girl sounds appropriate.

I didn’t say how Payroll came to discover the spreadsheet and get a copy did I?

Our telephony guy is the same age as a young lady in that area of Finance, and she now has his surname. I’m not sure she’s keen on automating that bit just yet.

You need to use a nice fine needle, like you might find in a hospital.

Luckily the local chemist is willing to sell weird stuff if you have a convincing reason and don’t look like a druggie.

I went in, asked for a 100ml syringe and a transfusion kit. He was like “huh?” so I explained that I need to make up bottles of dilute nitric acid with 50ml of acid. The acid? Comes in 20 litre tubs. There’s literally no sensible way to pour out 50ml from a full tub of 20 litres of concentrated industrial nitric acid.
So I had the idea to fix a bit of the plastic tubing from the transfusion kit to the syringe. Drop that in, suck up 50ml, and not end up in hospital.
He was like, oh okay, and sold me the stuff. A lot cheaper than I was expecting.

I didn’t appreciate that the transfusion kit contained a bunch of scary ass needles. Which I took out and have to mom, because, ugh, needles.

It calls itself non fuming. It lies. Damn stuff “smokes” when you open the lid. Most of our nasties are alkaline, variations on the theme of sodium hydroxide. This nasty is an acid and can easily out nasty all the other nasties.
I call it Theresa.

Our telephony guy is the same age as a young lady in that area of Finance, and she now has his surname.

Aw, cute.

Kind of makes you wonder though, what would have happened to both of them if one didn’t work there? Would they have been destined to meet, or would they have booked up with other people?
It’s strange to think of how people meet in a world of seven billion, that that one person on that place is the one for you.

[well, not that I’d know, haven’t met anybody yet…]

I call it Theresa.

May I ask why ;)

It’s strange to think of how people meet in a world of seven billion, that that one person on that place is the one for you.

The world is strange, especially in the co-incidence occurrence.

My 5 x great-grandfather lived in Cambridgeshire and married twice.
A descendant of wife 1 lives in Birmingham via a bit of ancestor time in Leamington – I’ve been in touch previously.
Meanwhile, some wife 2 descendants travelled to Sheffield and ultimately, a few generations down, my family moved to Coventry.

Stepdaughter of Birmingham descendant got a job at a large hospital.
In Coventry
In the IT department…

(Steve Pampling)

I don’t have any HP printers anymore, gpcl6 is part of the RISC OS ghostscript package from riscosports.

Grahame Parish:
I must correct myself. cawf understands centimeters wherever it accepts a number with a unit. So you European types can specify your papersize in centimeters!

It also groks:
inches
centimeters
points
picas
u=m=n=v = 1/240 of an inch which is what it actually thinks in.