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Old January 14th 16, 05:39 PM posted to alt.windows7.general,comp.periphs.printers,microsoft.public.windowsxp.general,alt.comp.hardware
Paul
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Posts: 13,364
Default What extension for a print to file?

Micky wrote:
I'm not able to print to my newly installed Brother black and white
laser printer so I printed to a file instead. From Firefox.

It asks what the name of the file is, and I don't konw what extension
to give it.

Things were the same with my fully functioning Brother AIO, I don't
knolw what to name the file and the 200 page manual doesn't say a word
about that.

When I gave it a .jpg extension, it was described as damaged or
corrupted. I know it wouldn't take a bribe so it must be damaged, or
I named it wrong.

What extension for a print to file?


As David says, try ".prn" as the extension.

Then, change the name like this after printing is complete

someprint.prn.txt

and open with a text editor. There should at least
be a few lines of "header" info at the beginning
and the end, that you can read.

The actual language inside the print job, could be
PCL5, PCL6, PostScript and so on. You will need to
expand your technicians toolkit to work with that stuff.

In this example, the encapsulation sections, you'd
remove those, and the resultant file is then
"standard PostScript". So the print file can consist
of more than one layer, which may be important
if post-processing with other tools, and they
cannot "tolerate" noise. I removed the non-ASCII characters
when copying this, so this isn't a verbatim copy of
what you'll see.

12345X@PJL JOB \___ encapsulation, remove
@PJL ENTER LANGUAGE = POSTSCRIPT /
%!PS-Adobe-3.0
%%Title: f1040.pdf
....
Pscript_WinNT_Min dup /min_terminate get exec
%%EOF
12345X@PJL EOJ \___ encapsulation, remove
12345X /

In the case of a PostScript interpreter, it probably
manages to ignore the encapsulation, and I remove the
header and trailer as a matter of appearances.

But if you're the curious type, examination
with a text editor would be a start.

Paul