• Meeting Notes for November 8, 2003
  • Main Presentation
    • HP PCL
    • Postscript and PDF
  • Photo Management
  • Business
  • Help Desk
  • Coming Up
  • Programmer's SIG

Meeting Notes for November 8, 2003

Main Presentation

Rick Benkstein handed out some advertising materials for his company after giving an overview of what he wants to discuss. Not really, it was actuallly tasteful info.

HP PCL

HP PCL is HP's Printer Control Language. It's what most HP printers use to print out your documents and images. It's been adopted by many other printer manufacturers, too. Rick uses this to format his reports. Wide reports get printed in a smaller font to make it fit on standard 8.5x11 paper. Reports that aren't as wide get printed in a larger font to fill out the paper, and look nice.

PCL commands start with an ESC character followed by a character(s) to start a command. Next comes the command's parameters. For example, "ESC(s10H" tells

it to set it to 10 characters per inch. A capital letter is the beginning of a sequence, and a lowercase letter is the end of a case. For example, the two commands:

and

Could be combined as

Note the H from the first command was made lowercase.

Someone asked where you'd do all of this, and the answer is that most users don't. Your printer drivers will usually do it for you. If you've got a plain text file, you can put this into your plain text file, and send it directly to your pointer, with a command like:

Rick gave us some samples of forms he creates, along with the PCL used to create the form. He first used some shading on the forms to make them look nicer, but he found that when his customers faxed the forms, the shaded areas became unreadable. So he doesn't do shading anymore, even though it looked great on the original prints.

You can even print out UPC codes with it.

? User Page" href="tiki-index.php?page=UserPagePhilG" class="wiki">Phil Goembel asked why Rick uses PCL instead of Postscript. The reason is that Rick's needs are rather simple, and if he were to use Postscript, the system would generally have to do the work of converting the Postscript to PCL anyway. If he's got a lot of data to print, it's enough faster to use PCL directly to make it worth it.

Postscript and PDF

Rick got into doing postscript when one of his customers requested the ability to email their reports in addition to printing them. Well, he can't just convert the PCL into something you can print just anywhere, so he started using postscript. He uses the ps2pdf program to convert the postscript document to PDF format for sending via email. The postscript can be printed, and the PDF is usually smaller (and often not editable), to be more appropriate for sending to others via email.

To deal with graphics, he uses the ImageMagick? program, convert to convert images in GIF and JPG formats to postscript. He can then just concatenate the postscript to his generated data, and get a single document.

Photo Management

Rick's gotten interested in doing photo albums, and wanted to show how advanced Linux was in this area. So first he tried to show what it was like in Windows. It wasn't pretty. Windows doesn't seem to get along with Rick, so he called it useless, and described it. If you've used Windows Explorer to look at a directory full of images, you've seen it. He then showed us Linux, where it does pretty much the same thing. Open the directory with the file manager, and you see a small thumbnail of each picture.

Business

Attendence: 21 people, 2 new.

We'll be going with the new tiki software. As soon as I get it fixed up a little, we'll be moving all the data from the TWiki site to it. More details will follow soon. Rick Benkstein will be getting some more information about the Wisconsin Association for Systems Managers. The group is looking to see if any MLUG people would be interested in attending their meetings, and vice versa.

Help Desk

Rick Benkstein - shift to AS2 for EDI. Chuck Stapleton Linux doesn't support DDE or IPC

George Moulton? added a second IDE controller card, and is having problems mounting filesystems from it. Rick Miller suggested trying to create an ext3 filesystem instead and force it to do badblock checks, to ensure the bad blocks are really found.

Whil Hentzen is looking for a new soundcard. Several people suggested SoundBlaster Live! cards work very well.

Coming Up

• OpenSSH by Joe Baker December, 2003.

Programmer's SIG

Planning meeting. See November2003 for details