pcloverlay--Create forms overlays for Laserjet PCL printing by
© Anthony Lawrence, aplawrence.com
Kevin Smith

Kevin Smith of Shadetree Software has allowed us to mirror this from his site.

This is a simple utility to convert a single page document to an form overlay for printing on HP LaserJet printers.

This was inspired by 'ovl' Hewlett Packard PCL Laser Overlay creation utility by Peter Hamilton, https://www.hamil.demon.co.uk/pcl/

This is a complete re-write with somewhat more sophiscated escape sequence parsing. I basicly stole his setup for the overlay macro and his list of sequences to delete from the stream.

Peter's original was distributed under the GNU Version 2, June 1991 General Public License. I don't know what that means for my re-write. I am imposing no restrictions on my version.

Description

Converts a single page document in HP-PCL to an overlay macro.

A form document is normally created by editing the form in your favorite editor (Wordperfect, msword, etc.) and printing it to a file (using a HP laserjet driver). This creates a file containing the raw printer commands for the form.

The raw printer codes are passed through pcloverlay to create an overlay file. The overlay file should then be sent to the printer ahead of data on which it will be overlayed.

Overlay macros are automatically invoked at the end of each page during normal printing. Therefore, during normal printing, whenever a page break is encountered, the commands in the overlay macro will be played back on top of whatever is already on the page.

Usage

pcloverlay [-d]

-d will create debug output on stderr

Reads stdin and writes stdout

When printing, simply pre-pend the overlay form to your normal data stream. Ensure your data stream does not contain a printer reset command (ESC+E). It also shouldn't contain page orientation commands (ESC+&lnO).

Processing

Parse PCL commands.

Remember any orientation command in the first N bytes (N is based on the output buffer which is currently 4096 bytes).

Delete certain commands inappropriate to an overlay macro

<esc>E                  Printer reset
<esc>*r<n>F             Raster rotate image
<esc>&l<n>O             Orientation (remembered)
<esc>&l<n>A             Set page size
<esc>&l<n>H             Set paper source
<esc>&l<n>G             Don't know... Peter was deleting
<esc>&l<n>P             Set page length      
<esc>&l<n>S             Simplex/Duplex printing
<esc>&l<n>X             Number of copies
 

Output the macro setup commands

<esc>E          Printer reset
<esc>&lnnnO     Orientation (nnn = 0-3)
<esc>&f
     1y         Macro ID 1
     0x         Start macro def.
     0S         Push the current position.
<esc>*r0F               Raster orientation matches document
 

Output the form commands from stdin

Output the macro close and overlay enable commands

Files

• README
• Makefile
• pcloverlay.c
• SCO OSR 5.x ELF binary (dynamic libraries)
• Test file from which you can generate a simple overlay form (test.pcl)

Comments?

More Articles by Kevin Smith 2015-04-01 Kevin Smith

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