PCL, or PS Question...

Hey guys... I'm really confused...

I'm trying to print pictures, big full, Letter size pictures. And I have a
printer connected with both Post Script, and PCL drivers installed. When I
try to print a picture with the PCL driver, it crashes. Every time... Is PCL
only used for letters, not pictures?

When I print with the PS driver, it works just fine. According to the
manufacture of the printer, I can get higher resolution if I use the PCL
driver. So I would like to use that. But I'm lost because I don't know what
the difference is between the two types of drivers, and witch is better to
use.

I'm using a Minolta 2350EN printer. With a Windows computer. Any help is
welcome! Cuz I'm lost...

Thanks in advance.

wrote in message . com...
Hey guys... I'm really confused...

I'm trying to print pictures, big full, Letter size pictures. And I have a
printer connected with both Post Script, and PCL drivers installed. When I
try to print a picture with the PCL driver, it crashes. Every time... Is PCL
only used for letters, not pictures?

When I print with the PS driver, it works just fine. According to the
manufacture of the printer, I can get higher resolution if I use the PCL
driver. So I would like to use that. But I'm lost because I don't know what
the difference is between the two types of drivers, and witch is better to
use.

I'm using a Minolta 2350EN printer. With a Windows computer. Any help is
welcome! Cuz I'm lost...

Both PS and PCL are "page description languages". PS has been used in
high end DTP since the 80s. It has always had excellent support for
smooth vector art and type. PCL I think is an outgrowth of dot matrix
languages. It was originally all about bitmaps.

However, more recent version of both have picked up features from the
other.
As for the differences, PCL is closer to the dot pattern so it should
give you more control. Conversely, PS is more portable, and thus less
device dependent -- so it's the choice if you are going to send your
file on to a printer (the person, with the offset press).

If PCL jobs crash, there are a few possibilities. One is that the
driver is not sending the variety of PCL that your printer needs, is
this one supplied by Minolta?

Another is that you have overflowed the printer's memory. Normally you
get some kind of error message if that's the case, &/or a partial
printout. If you can print a smaller image but not a larger, that's
probably the problem. You can buy more RAM for the printer to fix
this.

In article ,
wrote:
Hey guys... I'm really confused...

I'm trying to print pictures, big full, Letter size pictures. And I have a
printer connected with both Post Script, and PCL drivers installed. When I
try to print a picture with the PCL driver, it crashes. Every time... Is PCL
only used for letters, not pictures?

Definitely no. PCL is simpler language then PS, in case of complicated
pictures I prefer it against PS because it takes too much time to count
completed page. In case of PCL big part is done by computer's processor.

What you mean by crash ?
You can use

When I print with the PS driver, it works just fine. According to the
manufacture of the printer, I can get higher resolution if I use the PCL
driver. So I would like to use that. But I'm lost because I don't know what
the difference is between the two types of drivers, and witch is better to
use.

It is little bit strange, there's no reason for that. It sounds to me
like a GDI printer.

Postscript is better language, it has support for vector and bitmap
graphics too. For example when you want to print circle, you tell in
postscript to print it. In PCL, computer has to count all points of
circle and send them all to printer. So in first case you have to have
bigger printer's memory and faster printer's processor but you benefit
by less load of computer and smaller print files.
Postscript printer has also bugger family of fonts in it - in case of
level 2, 35 scalable fonts.

Unfortunately Windows don't use full potential of PS printers, there's
only one benefit i know - most used truetype fonts are replaced by
printer's fonts which are very good. In previous versions there were
possible to print more pages on one sheet - but it is in case of w2k
history.


Jan Gregor

wrote:

Hey guys... I'm really confused...

I'm trying to print pictures, big full, Letter size pictures. And I have a
printer connected with both Post Script, and PCL drivers installed. When I
try to print a picture with the PCL driver, it crashes. Every time... Is PCL
only used for letters, not pictures?
PCL should be able to reproduce any picture limited only by the
capability of your printer's hardware. There must be an error in the
PCL printer driver you are using.
When I print with the PS driver, it works just fine. According to the
manufacture of the printer, I can get higher resolution if I use the PCL
driver. So I would like to use that. But I'm lost because I don't know what
the difference is between the two types of drivers, and witch is better to
use.
The theoretical difference between the two languages is huge. "The
PostScipt language is a simple interpretive programming language with
powerful graphics capabilities".
(http://partners.adobe.com/asn/develo...fs/tn/PLRM.pdf). Contrast
that with "Hewlett-Packard created the PCL printer language to provide
an economical and efficient way for application programs to control a
range of printer features across a number of printing devices"
(http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/su...0/bpl13210.pdf).
PCL is strictly intended for sending pre-formatted data to a printer
but you could write a dozen lines of PostScript program, send it to
your printer, and your printer will produce thousands of different
pages of print. In practice, the programming facilities of PostScript
are not used and there is little difference between the languages in
their abilities "to control a range of printer features across a
number of printing devices".


I'm using a Minolta 2350EN printer. With a Windows computer. Any help is
welcome! Cuz I'm lost...
I had a similar problem with my Brother laser printer. The PCL driver
did not crash but in some programs, including Word 2000, it just
ignored the driver settings. Assuming that you have already downloaded
the latest Minolta drivers and Minolta technical support have not
solved the problem, try using the drivers for a comparable Hewlett
Packard product from www.hp.com. My HL-1850 is working well with a
Laserjet 2300 PCL 5e driver although it failed with HP's PCL 6 driver.
It seems that Brother's (and maybe Minolta's) hardware engineers are
ahead of their software counterparts.

Thanks in advance.