pcl5

The pcl5 driver supports Hewlett Packard and other printers from the 1990s and later.

Syntax:

      set terminal pcl5 {<mode>} {{no}enhanced}
          {size <plotsize> | size <width>{unit},<height>{unit}}
          {font "<fontname>,<size>"} {pspoints | nopspoints}
          {fontscale <scale>} {pointsize <scale>} {linewidth <scale}
          {rounded|butt} {color <number_of_pens>}

<mode> is landscape or portrait. <plotsize> is the physical plotting size of the plot, which can be one of the following formats: letter for standard (8 1/2" X 11") displays, legal for (8 1/2" X 14") displays, noextended for (36" X 48") displays (a letter size ratio), extended for (36" X 55") displays (almost a legal size ratio), or a4 for (296mm X 210mm) displays. You can also explicitly specify the canvas size using the width and height options. Default unit is in. Default size is letter.

<fontname> can be one of stick, univers (default), albertus, antique_olive, arial, avant_garde_gothic, bookman, zapf_chancery, clarendon, coronet, courier courier_ps, cg_times, garamond_antigua, helvetica, helvetica_narrow, letter_gothic, marigold, new_century_schlbk, cg_omega, palatino, times_new_roman, times_roman, zapf_dingbats, truetype_symbols, or wingdings. Font names are case-insensitive and underscores may be replaced by spaces or dashes or may be left out. <fontsize> is the font size in points.

The point type selection can be the a limited default set by specifying nopspoints, or the same set of point types as provided by the postscript terminal by specifying pspoints (default).

The butt option selects lines with butt ends and mitered joins (default), whereas rounded selects rounded line ends and joins.

Line widths, and point and font sizes can be scaled using the linewidth, pointscale, or fontscale options, respectively.

color selects the number of pens <number_of_pens> used in plots. Default is 8, minimum 2.

Note that built-in support of some of these options is printer device dependent. For instance, all the fonts are supposedly supported by the HP Laserjet IV, but only a few (e.g. univers, stick) may be supported by the HP Laserjet III and the Designjet 750C. Also, color obviously won't work on monochrome devices, but newer ones will do grey-scale.

Defaults: landscape, a4, 8 pens, univers, 12 point, pspoints, butt, no scaling

The pcl5 terminal will try to request fonts which match your encoding. Note that this has highest priority, so you might end up with a different font face. The terminal's default encoding is HP Roman-8.

Limitations:

This terminal does not support alpha transparency. Transparent filling is emulated using shading patterns. Boxed text is not implemented.

The support for UTF-8 is limited. Lacking the label mode for UTF-8 output in HP-GL/2, the driver reverts to PCL for strings containing 8bit characters. UTF-8 text is limited to angles of 0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees. Also vertical alignment might be off depending on the font.

Some enhanced text features (phantom box, overprinting) require using PCL features in addition to HP-GL/2. This conforms to the specs but may not work with your printer or software.