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You can download the fonts to the printer by writing some code. On the other hand, in many occasions you might want to do it under command prompt or in a shell environment. The downloading involves three steps:
-
Designate a Font ID to the soft font. The Font ID should be unique among all soft fonts.
The PCL command to use is
<esc>*c#D, while#is the decimal value of the Font ID. Send the actual soft font.
Make the font permanent by sending PCL command
<esc>*c5F.
Step 1 and 2 must be carried out in one connection. If for some reason they can not be sent together in one command line, you need to merge data into one file and send this file instead. We'll explain how to achieve this soon.
There are several methods to send the data above to the printer, depending on the platform and connection choice. For example, if the printer is directly connected to a computer via a parallel port, or the printer is shared among a Windows network, you can use copy to send data to the printer. If it is a network printer connected to a TCP/IP network, you will need to use lpr command.
In preparation of downloading the soft font to your printer, consider that the number you will assign as the font ID. Each soft font must have an unique number associated. Any font with the same ID overwrites the previouse one.
In the example we provided, we put the font ID command in file
C80D.txt. Another file c5F.txt
contains the command for step 3.