Downloading soft fonts to PCL printers

You can download missing fonts as soft fonts to PCL printers if you want to keep down the size of the output sent to the printer. The downloaded soft fonts are available to the printer until it is restarted. If the printer is restarted, you must download the soft fonts again.

TTF soft font files

You can download TTF fonts as soft fonts to the printer. Please contact your StreamServe supplier for information on how to acquire soft fonts. The soft fonts must have a format supported by the printer, and include the same character set as specified for the output. For example, if you use Russian version TrueType fonts in the Project, the corresponding soft fonts must include the Russian version.

Type 1 soft font files

You can download Type 1 fonts as soft fonts to the printer. To create a Type 1 soft font file, you must convert the binary *.pfb font file to an ASCII *.pfa font file. Then you add the following section at the beginning of the *.pfa file:

%!load the font in VM
serverdict begin
0
exitserver

How to convert *.pfb files to *.pfa files is not described in this document.

To download soft fonts

1	In Design Center, activate the generic Platform layer, and double-click the output connector that delivers the output to the PCL printer. The Output Connector Settings dialog opens.

2	Click the General icon and select Enable download.

3	In Download File, specify the soft font file to download.

4	Export the Project, start the StreamServer, and send output to the PCL printer. The soft font is downloaded to the PCL printer.

When you have downloaded the soft fonts, you must use the printer menu to print a list of all installed PCL fonts. This list includes the escape sequences for the downloaded soft fonts. Then you must add the new soft font entries to the driver file. See Adding TTF fonts to PCL driver files.

Enabling soft fonts for the PDF (PCL convert) driver

If you are using the PDF (PCL convert) driver, you must add the following custom argument at the beginning of the startup argument file:

-pcl2pdfarg -ru:1