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Good afternoon.

I am running pcl6.exe version 9.15 on Windows 8.1.

I am running into a problem where pcl6.exe in silently converting any APOSTROPHE characters into RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK characters using the 16602 typeface in a PCL5 file.

Here is the command line I am using:

pcl6.exe -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=txtwrite -sOutputFile=test.txt test.prn

test.prn input (hex)

1B 28 30 55 1B 28 73 31 70 31 30 76 31 36 36 30 32 54 1B 26 61 30 76 30 48 3E 27 3C

test.prn input (text ['.' is the escape character])

.(0U.(s1p10v16602T.&a0v0H>'<

test.txt output (hex)

20 20 3E E2 80 99 3C 0D 0A

test.txt output (text)

  >’<..

expected test.txt output (hex)

20 20 3E 27 3C 0D 0A

expected test.txt output (text)

  >'<..

Is there a flag or an option somewhere that can disable this conversion?

Thank you for your time.

tr.el.em.en.oh
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2 Answers2

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txtwrite does the best it can with the input, PCL tends not to have much information in the PCL file to allow us to determine what the glyph should be (PostScript is better, and PDF often still better).

If you think there is a real problem I would suggest your best bet is to open a bug report. Apart from anything else, I would need to see the PCL file to determine what's going on. Most lkely the character code you are using corresponds to an apostrophe, which in the specific font is a right quote. There is no way for the text extraction device to know what shape the font will draw in response to a character code. At least, not in PCL

KenS
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  • There is a hex dump of PCL file in my post. The character in question is '0x27' which is the apostrophe. – tr.el.em.en.oh Oct 02 '14 at 16:58
  • I don't actually understand PCL, though I can laboriously decode it. In general I would always prefer to receive a complete example file, so that it can be traced through the interpreter. I can't do that with a fragment. In any event, if the character code is 0x27, then that's what you are going to get in the text output. There's nothing else in PCL to tell us what the character should be. – KenS Oct 02 '14 at 17:25
  • Ok. Here is a link to the files in question on Microsoft SkyDrive: http://1drv.ms/YUsn6b – tr.el.em.en.oh Oct 02 '14 at 18:22
  • Like I said if the character code is 0x27 then that's what txtwrite is going to use as the character code in the output. – KenS Oct 02 '14 at 19:57
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The problem was caused by the symbolset.

The sample was using the PCL ISO 6: ASCII symbolset (code 0U )

http://www.pcl.to/symbolset/pcl_0u.pdf

According to the 0U symbolset reference, APOSTROPHE (0x27) is replaced with RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (0x2019). Pcl6.exe then converts these UTF-16 bytes into their UTF-8 equivalent: 0xE28099

tr.el.em.en.oh
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