Hi,

I have a system written in dBaseIII and Clipper 5.1 which used PCL5 commands to enhance the printed output ie to change the pitch size and turn on/off bold. Now we have moved onto a laser which only supports PCL6. Can anyone suggest what the PCL6 commands are for the above requirements and how I could include them in my code.

Thanks

Ian

PCL6 is simply an extension of PCL5 as far as the features that would be used by Clipper 5.1 or dBase III are concerned. You should not need to do anything at all.

-PatP

I am guessing that your DBIII/clipper program is probably sending PCL commands straight to the printer (not going through the windows print driver)?

If this is the case then I would also guess that your printer is probably also capable of other emulations other than PCL5 & PCL6? With printers such as this there is usually a 'default emulation' setting. The default emulation is probably set to 'AUTO' which means that the printer looks at the first few lines of text with each print job and tries to determine which emulation it should use. Since your program is sending control characters on the fly it is probably not sending an initial string of characters that the printer can explicitly identify as PCL.

If all my guesses are correct then there are 2 possible solutions. 1) you could make sure that your print job sends initial PCL commands that identify the print job as PCL. Perhaps a 'universal reset' followed by the PCL codes to force a paper tray and paper size. or... 2) from the walk up control pad on the printer, change the printer's default emulation to either PCL5 or PCL6. This won't have any effect on normal Windows print operations since the window's print driver will explicitly force the emulation to be whichever driver you are using but for your print job that doesn't use the window's print driver it will allow the printer to recognize your embedded PCL and behave correctly.