[plug] Converting Laserjet output to Postscript

[Bernd Felsche]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 01:59:20PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> >How does one convert PCL4 or 5 (Laserjet) stuff to PostScript?

> Hmm...
> 
> I think that CUPS uses something like 'any2ps' or 'foo2ps' to do 
> something like that, but I'm not sure it handles PCL.

Nor am I! :-)

> I assume you've got some app that generates PCL and you want to make a 
> PDF or EPS of it's output?

Yep. To email/fax instead of sending by snail.

I'd rather not rasterise to TIFF and then convert the bitmap to
PostScript.

> If it's a 'doze app, you can usually just use a different printer driver 

It's Linux. FormTrap's (shhhh!) lack of PostScript support appears
to be a result of corner-coding; like painting into a corner... :-)

I've found lj2ps but is appears to be unmaintained since about 1990.  :-(
http://www-wisconsin.cern.ch/~lishka/progs/lj2ps/lj2ps_intro.html

I'll give that a whirl. Not much to lose except hours(!). What else
have I got to do at night except waste my time sleeping.

OTOH: there's www.pcl2pdf.com that appears stupidly-expensive.

> Ok, that's it: /usr/share/cups/hpgltops . It's a CUPS filter and follows 
> the std CUPS filter API, so you should be able to use it.

That's HP-GL; almost nothing like PCL. HP-GL is chiefly used by
plotters, etc for drawing lines with pens.

-- 
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