[SOLVED] PLC5e file to a non-PCL compatible printer

gbro115 · 01-25-2012, 10:26 PM

Hi,

I have been lurking on the forums for some time, but have only now had reason to register and request some help.

I have an application used by our business which generates PCL5e reports which are sent via raw printers on CUPS to PCL-compatible printers. The application is server-based and all print jobs are sent to CUPS from the server, not the client machines.

I now have a non-PCL-compatible printer in the mix. It is a Brother MFC-7360n, connected via Ethernet and also to a local machine via USB. CUPS is talking to the printer over the Ethernet connection. I have tried Brother's BINARY_P1 queue as well as the PCL_P1 queue in the URI, but to no avail.

Brother have a CUPS driver which I have installed. This works fine for printing CUPS test pages and other documents, but documents sent from our application simply produce a single blank page. If I configure the CUPS printer with a raw queue, multiple blank pages are printed.

I have been working at this for a few days now & figure that I need something in between the PCL5e output and the Brother driver to convert the document into a format the driver will understand. I have looked into cups-pdf, but cannot get it to work with these generated PCL5e documents either. If I could then write a script to print the PDF (which would be trivial) it would all work nicely. How do I convert from this raw PCL5e document to a PDF with cups-pdf or similar?

I have done a considerable amount of reading up on this over the last couple of days and am not making much progress. Any advice as to how I might set this up would be most appreciated.

George

michaelk · 01-26-2012, 07:17 AM

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.

I have never played with ghostpcl (http://www.ghostscript.com/) but it will convert a PCL file to PDF.

teckk · 01-28-2012, 04:36 PM

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docvie...2569c100799559

It's listed as a host based GDI printer. It probably won't work with anything but micosoft.

Quote:

The terms GDI, Host-based, Host-based (GDI), Host-Based Printing , Proprietary (GDI) , and Windows GDI are generic terms that can refer to any Host-based or Windows-only printer, which use a proprietary printer data stream rather than an industry-standard printer data stream such as IBM Proprinter Data Stream (PPDS), Epson ESC/P2, HP Printer Control Language (PCL), or Adobe PostScript (PS). These printers support printing from Windows, and possibly from Macintosh or Linux, but will not print directly from IBM i, IBM i5/OS, IBM OS/400, UNIX or any other non-PC-based Operating System, even if the printers can be network-attached. Because these printers require a proprietary printer data stream, they will not work with Host Print Transform (HPT) or a PC5250 Printer Definition Table (PDT) File.

michaelk · 01-28-2012, 06:02 PM

The OP did state that the printer was working except for PCL generated reports.

gbro115 · 01-30-2012, 03:50 PM

Apologies for the delayed reply & thank you all for your suggestions.

Using a combination of a simple Perl server (http://aplawrence.com/MacOSX/macosxcupstofile.html) and GhostPCL, I was able to have CUPS pass on the PCL5e data to the Perl server which then coverts it to a PDF. The host then submits the PDF to the printer & deletes the PCL & PDF files.

I'm starting the script from a remote machine as follows:
ssh x.x.x.x 'nohup perl /Applications/pclConvertServer.pl </dev/null >nohup.out 2>1&1 &'

The server in Perl

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use IO::Socket::INET;
$myport=12000;
$pserve=IO::Socket::INET->new(LocalPort => $myport,Type=>SOCK_STREAM,Reuse=>1,Listen=>1) or die "can't do that $!\n";
while ($pjob=$pserve->accept()) {
        open(J,">>/tmp/pclConvertServer/in.pcl") or print "having issues $!\n";
        while (<$pjob>) {
                print J "$_";
        }
        close J;
        close $pjob;

        # Convert the pcl file to a PDF
        system("pcl6 -o /tmp/pclConvertServer/PDF/out.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite /tmp/pclConvertServer/in.pcl");

        # Send the PDF to the printer via the local CUPS server
        system("lp -d CUPS-PRINTER-NAME /tmp/pclConvertServer/PDF/out.pdf");

        # Remove temporary files (important!)
        system("rm /tmp/pclConvertServer/in.pcl");
        system("rm /tmp/pclConvertServer/PDF/out.pdf");
}

I'm running this on an Ubuntu server. Ideally I'd like to be able to convert this to a daemon script and have the ability to start/stop as an Ubuntu service. For now however, this solution is working fine.

Thanks again for the suggestions.

George

michaelk · 01-30-2012, 03:59 PM

Thanks for the follow up post.

Geremia · 12-26-2013, 10:13 PM

This might be of help: http://welcome.solutions.brother.com...html#MFC-7360N

Geremia · 07-11-2014, 10:48 PM

See this: http://support.brother.com/g/b/downl...=4&type3=10034