*BSD News Article 78100


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From: jfieber@indiana.edu (John Fieber)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: HP PCL printer drivers ?
Date: 11 Sep 1996 22:10:07 GMT
Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington
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To: vikas@navya.com

In article <DxK0Eo.HLE@tigger.jvnc.net>,
	vikas@newsreader.jvnc.net (Vikas Aggarwal) writes:
> Are there any PCL printer drivers available on
> the net ? Any Postscript to PCL converters ? Or is Postscript the only
> language for getting 'troff' and 'latex' and other such output ?

A common practice is to use ghostscript (in the ports collection)
as your printer driver.  It takes postscript in one end, and (in your
case) sends PCL out the other end.  Then, for all practical purposes,
you can pretend you have a postscript printer.  Look at
http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/printing.html for some examples.

There are direct dvi->PCL drivers for TeX, but then you miss all the
nifty features of dvips, like using postscript fonts, postscript
graphics and the like.  The latest version of groff has a PCL level 5
driver but, as you might expect, the results are only marginally
useful on a deskjet (I just tried it).

-john

== jfieber@indiana.edu ===========================================
== http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ================