Editing a PCL file

[crazyGal]

Hi there,

I'm working on a task that deals with editing a PCL (Printer Command Language) file. The requirement is search/replace a key/value pair if found in the file. When I try this, either the file gets corrupted or the wrong data gets edited. It works fine if I try for single key/value. The more I try to edit, it gets messed up. I've been trying to find the page limiter for such PCL files since my scope is limited to editing first couple of pages. I followed PCL command reference and tried to make sense of such files but still I'm not quite successful with editing these files.

My question is, is it safe to edit PCL files in Windows? I've a bunch of PCL files to edit and each PCL file is different when it comes to the header part. So, I'm not able to figure out a standard simple way to edit these files.

Could someone throw few pointers on this one? This would help me a lot.

Thanks,
Thilak

[chaarmann]

It depends on the Editor you are using. Will it preserve and show non-ascii characters? Will it preserve Carrige-Return and Line-Feed? And do you fully understand the structure to edit binary data? If all yes, then it's save.

Else the best is to do the editing via Pcl Viewer or a perl-script.

I would use a pcl-to-pdf converter to convert it to pdf, then edit it with a pdf-editor (or Open-Office) and then convert it back to pcl (for example by just printing to file)