Converting PCL bitmaps to PDF?

Peter sent on December 3rd, 2010: |----------------------------------------------------------------------| |"I am trying to get a presentable hard copy from Orcad SDT/386 which | |can be emailed etc to people. | | | |I have PLOTALL working, and outputting in postscript, all fine, and by| |importing the .ps file into say Corel Draw I get a fine schematic. | | | |Except the fonts are useless. | | | |[..] | | | |If one could run PRINTALL and generate a PCL file (which one can; it | |is a pure bitmap with no font information) and then converted that to | |some graphical image, or alternatively ran some other driver (did | |anybody write Orcad drivers which output TIFF?), that would do it | |because images can be easily manipulated and printed to a PDF using | |Acrobat." | |----------------------------------------------------------------------|

I do not have that program, but I have some ideas. However, it is not really clear why you posted, as you seem to have already devised a solution (which you have not tried yet).

If the fonts as shown in the Postscript file are useless only in Corel Draw (i.e. you would be happy with the fonts just being bitmapped in another program but Corel Draw is not good at displaying them), then perhaps you could try the program ps2pdf

Otherwise, if the Postscript file itself is unsatisfactory, then you could take a screenshot when running Orcad and paste it into a graphical program.

Regards, Paul Colin

Can you print to CutePDF?

John

Install "pdfcreator" from This will give you a "pdf printer" - any program on windows can then generate pdf files as a simple printout.

You can also open postscript files with pdfcreator, and then generate a pdf file from that (though I can't guarantee the fonts will be right - it's easy to mess up postscript fonts).

Isn't that version of Orcad DOS based? Various PDF printers are unlikely to be of use in that I case I expect.

Searching for PCL viewer brings up some possibilities though (including free). Once in a Windows viewer it might be possible to print to a PDF.

Robert

Hi Peter,

[l> I am trying to get a presentable hard copy from Orcad SDT/386 which

I suspect you *don't* mean "hard copy" (since it is awfully hard to *E*mail). Rather, some "portable document format" that your recipients are likely to be able to "print"/view, locally...

Do you know if the font problem is associated with Corel's presentation of the PS file? Or, are they botched in the original document (which corel is reproducing faithfully)?

Ah, OK. That answers my question -- the PS file is hosed (useless).

Why can't you do exactly this? Or, does that (old) version not go through the windows drivers, etc. (i.e., DOS client writing directly to LPT:)?

[regards to J, S & J]

Have a look at

In particular, PCLprint might work for you (when wired to PDFwriter in windows). Once in Acrobat, you can diddle with it to your heart's content (?)

Go to

and join the group. Then go to the files section and download sch2pdf.zip. This will give you a very pretty PDF of your schematic that has searchable text. You need to run this on Windows NT, 2k, or XP as the batch file uses newer commands not found in DOS, Win 95/98.

SDT_printer_drivers.zip has PCL printer drivers and a converter for PCL to PCX image format. This is used when you need to include a copy of your schematic in a word processor document.

Hi Peter,

A "free" (trial) option might be:

N.B. I have no first-hand experience with either of these. However, I will be exploring the issue as it seems a handy "general purpose" tool to have available...

That was exactly the solution, developed by "QRK" above ;)

Orcad SDT will print to PS, via its PSCRIPT.DRV driver.

Then one uses Ghostscript to generate a PDF from the postscript file.

The rather complicated batch file uses some sed invocations to pipe the postscript while changing the name of the font to another font which more closely represents the one originally used in Orcad SDT.

So, problem solved. One also ends up with a searchable PDF which is quite slick. But I think somebody spent an awful lot of time on this batch file :)

Yes, that is another way to do it. The resulting image files are pretty big though.

Incidentally, is there a way to print a PDF such that the sheet covers say two A4 pages, which can then be taped together?

With the original Orcad (DOS) bitmap printer drivers, this could be arranged to happen automatically. It made larger schematics readable...

I would try to add the very fonts used to the front of the PS file. A bit of a hack, but it would solve the problem for good. (Except for people who get irritated if a 300 bpi font is printed in 1200 bpi.)

Groetjes Albert

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