🚀 go-pugleaf

Matthew Sean Thyer (mthyer@cairo.anu.edu.au) wrote:

: I need to drive a Hewlett Packard DraftPro EXL plotter from a program
: called Applixware (a word processor / spreadsheet / graphics / mail)
: program for UNIX.  My problem is that this program will only print to
: postscript or PCL5 printers but I need to generate HPGL (Hewlett
: Packard Graphics Language) to run the plotter.

: The program does export to HPGL format but the text quality is not good
: enough as it writes all text in Courier font!... most unsatisfactory

  You need the manufacturer of the program to fix this limitation.

: So what I really need is a UNIX program that can do high quality postscript
: to HPGL conversion.  Failing that I'll be happy with PCL to HPGL conversion.

  This is going to be incredibly difficult since the DraftPRO is a pen
  plotter and PostScript is targeted to very sophisticated printers that are
  primarily dot-oriented.  Commands in PostScript such as font definitions,
  grayscales, raster images, etc, have no meaning to a pen plotter.  

  One might try to emulate a dot printer and send HPGL commands to lift and
  drop the pen for every dot created by a Postscript interpreter but this
  would hammer the pens flat in a few minutes.

--

                  ________________________________
         ________|         Bill Hassell           |________
         \       |     HP Customer Support        |       /
          \      |    blh@hpuerca.atl.hp.com      |      /
          /      |________________________________|      \
         /__________)                          (__________\