PCL Renderer

[Jeremias Maerki <de...@jeremias-maerki.ch>]

The PCL renderer is now more or less operational, including
reference-orientation. There are a few details to attend to, like
kerning and font support. If anyone does a test drive, I'd love to hear
some feedback.

In order to support additional fonts I'd like to implement TrueType
support. Since the PCL reference does not contain an example of TrueType
embedding, I seek an example PCL file that does TrueType embedding. The
problem: On Windows, all printer drivers I checked paint TrueType fonts
either as raster graphics or download the fonts as bitmap fonts. If
someone on MacOSX or some other Unix could generate a small PCL file in
which a TrueType font is used, I'd be very grateful. Maybe one of the
unixes may actually have the ability to embed TrueType fonts. But
considering my findings, I'm wondering if I should not simply do the
same as these Windows printer drivers and simply render the text as
raster graphics. The file size remains surprisingly small. I just don't
know if it has any negative impact on performance. And I wonder if
there's a reason why the TrueType fonts are not embedded. Hmmm.

Jeremias Maerki