CompuServe Messages

One of the advantages of HP's PCL language is the fact that except for the Esc character itself, almost all commands are composed entirely of 'normal' characters such as letters, digits, and punctuation symbols such as '*', '&', '(', ')', '@', and '%', so you seldom *need* a full hex dump. I'll just supplement Scott's answer by explicitly commenting that the PCL printers don't have a hardware function equivalent to your old machine's Hex Dump". There *is* a command which can be used to force the characters immediately after it to be printed as symbols, instead of responded to as control-codes. It's called "Transparent Print", and its format is <Esc>&p#X… where you substitute for the '#' the number of characters which are to be thus treated. (The maximum value is 32767.) I've never tested that command on a mixture of control-codes and normal characters, but you might try tacking it onto the beginning of a (short) file. Since the only control codes in most PCL files are Esc, CR, LF, and FF, it might be useful if it works. Irv Thomae (SizeIt author) Succinct Systems, Inc.