Visual Software

The main Forms Electric product page has a section headed Creating PCL Forms Overlay at the "DOS" Command Prompt that discusses creating LaserJet PCL forms overlay macros using the command line utilities. These enable you to create PCL form files on disk with macro ids assigned.

Currently Pcl2pdf includes support for basic HP-GL/2 vector graphics commands only. For best results when creating macros using Forms Electric ensure first that the Windows LaserJet PCL printer driver's Graphics setting is set to raster and not vector. You can change this setting by following the steps detailed at Windows HP LaserJet PCL Printer Driver Setup Check this setting if your forms do not appear or are missing information when converting using Pcl2pdf.

Let's assume you have built a PCL forms macro file called form.pcl. This would contain the main overlay macro form.ovl assigned with macro id 1 as well as any soft fonts required by the macro that may be in form.fnt. You can use any reasonable macro id from 0 to 32767. The laser printers themselves use macro ids to distinguish between the different macros held in the printer's RAM memory. This is the only way they can tell them apart and use them.

If you want to use a second macro, perhaps for the cover page only, then create a second overlay file and assign it a different macro id:-

C> download cover.ovl /i:2 /o:cover.pcl

You can now build the complete PCL preload file for Pcl2pdf using the DOS copy command:-

C> copy /b form.pcl+cover.pcl macros.pcl

Take care not to omit the /b switch. This is essential to ensure all the data is copied into the final preload file. You can now use the preload file at runtime when converting PCL print files to PDF with Pcl2pdf:-

C> pcl2pdf32 test.pcl test.pdf -load:macros.pcl -f:1 -fc:2

Notice how the macro ids passed using -f and -fc match those specified in the Forms Electric Download commands.

Please see the Pcl2pdf User Guide section Pcl2pdf Runtime Forms Merging for further details on the switches available for preloading and merging PCL forms overlay macros.