PCL XL file is not printed

[SergeyAsp]

Hello.
I have a PCL XL document that is generated by my program, not by a printer driver.
This document is rendered correctly by GhostPCL so it's format is OK.
However when trying to print this document on real printer (e.g. HP LaserJet 2420 and other models), the result page is empty.

For comparison, I setup a generic HP LaserJet printer driver on a Windows machine. I open the document in other program and print-to-file using this generic printer driver. It generates PCL XL *.prn file. The file generated in this way will print on any of our printers.

When comparing this files I see that printer driver embeds Arial font in the document. However file generated by my program has references to Arial font that should be embedded in the printer according to PCL XL specification.

So why printer device can't determinate Arial font and doen't print text?

I share link to My file and driver file

[dansdaduk]

I suspect that the reason nothing prints (other than perhaps a PCL XL error page) is that your print job is specifying (in all 63 instances) use of an invalid symbol set identifier (with a Kind1 value of 65535 (0xffff)).

If you change this to use a Kind1 value of 14 (0x0e00 in binary-low-byte-first format), which is the equivalent of symbol set 0N (ISO-8859-1), your text (repeated lines of "This is a test!") should print OK.

Attached is a .zip file containing your original test file (my-program.pcl), a modified version (my-program_x01.pcl), and analyses of these two print files.

[SergeyAsp]

Thank you for the answer, it helped indeed.

But if I specify symbol set , I'll have to use char codes from this set in TextData parameter of TEXT operator.

I thought that setting this special value of symbol set(0xffff - I find it in some document) will allow me to use unicode values of glyphs.

Is there any way to use unicode values of glyphs in TEXT operator?

[dansdaduk · Accepted solution]

For Unicode (UCS-2) mapping, specify:

• Symbol set identifier = 18N
• The Kind1 equivalent value = 590 (or 0x4e02 in binary-low-byte-first format).

[SergeyAsp]

Does built-in Arial font have non-ASCII characters?

I have PCL file, that contains two lines of text:

"This is a test" - english

"Это тест" - russian

The second line is not printed neither by real printer nor by GhostPCL converter, though Unicode codes of russian characters are set correctly in the file.

There's a link to the file.

What should I do to have non-ASCII characters printed?

[dansdaduk]

The printer-resident Arial font provided with most LaserJet printers does include some non-ASCII characters, but (as far as I'm aware) does not include any Cyrillic characters.

I think that the only standard printer-resident LaserJet fonts which support Cyrillic are:

• Letter Gothic
• CG Times
• Courier

although I don't know if printer models made specifically for the Russian market have different  fonts.

Here is a scan of a printout (in this case produced on a PageWide Enterprise 556h printer, although the output from a LaserJet Pro 400 MFP M475dn is similar) showing the Cyrillic characters (in the Unicode range U+0400 - U+04FF) available with the printer-resident CG Times font:

The printout shows the Unicode code-point, and the equivalent UTF-8 byte sequence for each cell in the grid - not all cells map to an available glyph.

The printout was produced by the Font Sample tool in the (Windows .net) PCL Paraphernalia application, available via https://www.pclparaphernalia.eu

Attached is a .zip file containing a 'capture to file' of the print job, together with an analysis of that file.