Using the music editor Sibelius 7 on an Acorn A7000 computer with a Hewlett Packard Laserjet IIID duplux printer (and LjDuplex Pro) lead me to investigate PCL and working with Printout files in general. PCL data files, in particular, provided a means of overcoming the 'single score' feature of Sibelius -i.e. not being able to directly load all or part of one Sib7 file into another Sib7 file. Soon the program SibToDraw appeared which could handle this problem and also do much to improve Sibelius' Drawfile output. However, having come to understand a little about PCL5 and wishing to learn to use the Dr Wimp programming package I combined the two areas of interest in a small printing utility called PCLinfo.

The program originally had only one window which simply reported a few details about any printout file dragged to it, thus the name PCLinfo. However, it has grown a bit and now has in addition to the Information window, an Edit window which acts a 'frontend' to Andreas Dehmel's 'PCL_Tools' and a Paginate window which facilitates the radical re-ordering of PCL data within a printout file. The complete release of Andreas Dehmel's commandline utilities are stored in the PCL_Tools directory within PCLinfo's application directory and can be used directly from the commandline (bypassing PCLinfo) if required.

Being newly released, it is likely that are a few 'wrinkles' in the program, should you experience any difficulties or problems with PCLinfo, please do let me know. It is your feedback which will help to improve PCLinfo's usefulness and performance.

To download a copy of PCLinfo, click here

To download a copy of the Manual in HTML, click here

To download Five Articles on PCL, click here (Impression format)

To view a table of PCL5 commands, click here