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Virtual Printer Driver Applications
PageTech no longer offers custom printer drivers.
They are too expensive, require continual maintenance and are too high up the
workflow to provide the type of control we can provide AFTER the PCL is
generated from an off-the-shelf, royalty-free driver. In other words, we offer
products that may eliminate your perceived need for a custom driver and provide
a better alternative.
PCLTool SDK has several programs that provide a "Virtual Printer
Driver" capability for all 32-bit versions of Windows.
Depending on your application requirements, whether you have "canned"
PCL being inserted into the Windows print stream by the application using the
EscapePassThrough function or other variables at play... the first step is to
Install our Port Monitor.
Our Port Monitor would be configured to re-direct the PCL spool file (.SPL)
generated by the HP PCL printer driver to our PCLXForm.exe, PCLPrint.exe
or a custom program to perform whatever transformation function required. Once
the Port Monitor ("PMon1:") is configured, you would point your HP
PCL printer driver to it for its output.
When the Port Monitor captures the spool file from the HP PCL printer driver, we
can assign a serialized filenaming convention using our RDest.exe
program. The spool file can then be directly input into our PCLXForm (or, other
programs).
A PCLXForm.exe script program (.TPT) could extract all the text objects
found in the PCL file into an Text Extraction file (.TNX) by using
"Conversion=none" and "ExtractAllText=true" JobParam
functions. The script could then call TNXDUMP.exe to format the text
objects contained in the .TNX file into a flat ASCII text file (using the -w5
argument). Or, a script can extract the text by absolute positioning coordinates
using an index-by-location (.IBL) file and provide a comma- or
tab-delimited record for each file. This latter method is recommended for high
volume claim form and other static form "scraping" applications. In
our PCLTool SDK Demo see .\pcltsdk\scripts\denxform\ folder for a dental claim
form scraping script.
If your endusers use the 12 pt. resident Courier font in reverse text to
provide the path, filename, indexes, routing or any other information... we can
find it in the PCL and use it according to the parsing rules you establish in
the .TPT script. Look inside the .\pcltsdk\scripts\hidetext\ folder for more
information and an example.
We have several methods of extracting the text from a PCL file depending on the
nature of the file, fonts, driver options, etc. Please provide a zipped sample
PCL file for analysis. And, provide your complete application, workflow,
indexing, decollating, output filenaming, routing and other requirements.
Go to http://www.pcltools.com/pt700d
for our PCLTool SDK DEMO to perform your own compatibility testing and
evaluation. Thanks for your interest.