System Guide 3- 3Printing and queue managementASCII and PCL printing utilitiesASCII printing within various environments results in output that isnot always formatted as desired. Unfortunately, there is no“standard” method for printing ASCII files. ASCII is a character setand not a Page Description Language. Therefore, ASCII files donot contain format commands. Furthermore, there is no de factostandard for ASCII formatting.Nonetheless, users often have the requirement to match a specificformat. The utility below enables this formatting flexibility alongwith a feature in Queue Manager that allows the administrator toselect the default document format.ASCII and the PS or PCL decomposersThe Xerox Freeflow Print Server software automatically wrapsASCII files with a predefined set of PostScript code and sends thedata through the PostScript decomposer. Unfortunately, thispredefined formatting does not always meet customer ASCIIprinting needs and there are no “knobs” to change the formattingwithin PostScript.As an alternative, ASCII files can be identified as PCL and sentthrough the PCL decomposer. The PCL decomposer does providesome additional capabilities that can be used to modify ASCII filesas desired.To force ASCII files to use the PCL decomposer, change the fileformat in Job Manager. This can also be done by changing thequeue default document property from ASCII to PCL.setpclcontrol utilityThe setpclcontrol utility offers the following user controls:• Set the site default for the PCL decomposer line termination.Setting these options allows both native PCL files and ASCIIstreams forced through the PCL decomposer to beconditioned with various combinations of carriage returns(CR), line feeds (LF), and form feeds (FF). Mainframe andUNIX environments typically require some form of CR/LF/FFadjustment.• Set a custom paper size to map to the PCL escape sequence&|101A (which denotes “print on custom stock size”).HP printers generally respond to this command by imaging anarea of 11.7 x 17.7 inches and then printing the image,centered, on whatever stock is supplied by the operator. Thesetpclcontrol utility allows you to specify a single image andpaper size to correspond with this escape sequence.
