Print Server / Printer Accounting

[Kevin Colby]

Samuel Greenfeld wrote:
> 
> [...]  I myself need to do PCL and PS counting, but I myself have run
> into problems, especially since PCL seems to use ^L for both graphics
> and denoting pages (I do not know any PCL myself - this was just me
> studying what was in various print jobs).   PCL 6 is even more of a
> nightmare than PCL 5 to understand - it encodes text in binary form
> (Unicode or UTF-8, I suspect).

In PCL, the ^L will definitely denote a new page, unless it is part of
a section of raster data.  These can be detected by also parsing for
raster begins, which will tell you how many characters to jump ahead.
The actual raster begin code is "*r#A", where # is the section size
(e.g.  "*r55Axxxxxx...").  I believe raster graphics also need "*rB"
or "*rC" at the end of raster.

PCL isn't too difficult if you have a good reference.  It's just
visually cryptic.

	- Kevin Colby
	  kevinc at grainsystems.com