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PCL 5 Color Technical Reference Manual
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Notice Copyright and Trademarks License The information contained in Adobe, PostScript, and the this document is subject to PostScript logo are trademarks Copyright © 1999 change without notice. of Adobe Systems Incorporated Hewlett-Packard Company. which may be registered in certain jurisdictions. AppleTalk All rights are reserved. This is a registered trademark of document contains proprietary Apple Computer, Inc. PCL and information which is protected Resolution Enhancement are b
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Inside This Manual What You Can Learn From This Manual This manual describes the PCL 5 commands used to print color on the HP Color LaserJet printer family and the other Hewlett-Packard PCL 5 color printers. Some of the main topics include an overview of the color printing process, using palettes, choosing color modes, adjusting output color to meet your requirements, printing color raster graphics, and HP-GL/2 vector graphics. Examples are provided which demonstrate the use of the PCL 5 c
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Manual Organization This manual contains seven chapters and four appendices. Chapters 2 through 4 describe command usage for the HP Color LaserJet 4500 and 8500 printers. Appendices A through D describe how these functions are achieved on the HP Color LaserJet, Color LaserJet 5, 5M, and the DeskJet 1200C and 1600C printers. Chapters 5 through 7 pertain to all the color printers described in this manual. A brief description of each chapter is provided below. Chapter 1. Color Printing Overvi
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Chapter 7. Color Vector Graphics (HP-GL/2) This chapter discusses printing color pages using HP-GL/2, the vector graphics language included on all PCL 5 printers. The chapter describes new and/or modified HP-GL/2 commands and how they are used to print with HP color printers. Appendix A. Color Printing Overview (Color LaserJet, 5, 5M, DeskJet) Appendix A explains background information about printing color documents using PCL 5. Topics include palettes, device-dependent vs. device-independ
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Related Documents The following documents provide related information about Hewlett-Packard PCL 5 printers. PCL 5 Printer Language Technical Reference Manual The PCL 5 Printer Language Technical Reference Manual provides a description of the printer command language that controls PCL 5 printers. The manual provides explanations of each PCL command, and has examples demonstrating how the commands are used to manipulate the printer. A large portion of the manual is devoted to HP-GL/2, the v
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Contents PCL 5 Color Technical Reference Manual Inside This Manual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii Manual Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv Related Documents. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi Chapter 1 Color Printing Overview Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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CID Color Palettes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3-13 Device RGB and sRGB Palettes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3-13 Device CMY Palettes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3-14 HP-GL/2 Palettes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3-15 Foreground Color . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Rectangular Fill Examples. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5-52 Solid Fill (Black/White) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5-52 Shaded Fill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5-54 Chapter 6 Raster Graphics Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Appendix A Color Printing Overview (Color LaserJet, 5, 5M, DeskJet) Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A-1 Color Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A-3 Palettes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A-3 Raster Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Programming Color Palettes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C-20 Color Component One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C-20 Color Component Two . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C-20 Color Component Three . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C-21 Assign Color Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Contents xii EN
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Color Printing Overview 1 Introduction This chapter provides an overview of color printing with Hewlett-Packard printers. A primary goal for HP color printers has always been WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) color, where the color displayed on the screen while creating a document is the same as the color in the printed document. However, this goal has been very difficult to realize due to a number of factors such as: • Some colors that can be shown on a computer display cannot be re
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Working with color documents A document can be thought of as a series of text characters, vector graphics objects and images. The parts of a document either have color specifications in them, as do color images, or have color specifications applied to them, as do color vectors or text. For color images, the PCL 5 command set provides a way to specify the color format so that the image data can be interpreted correctly. For vector graphics and text, the PCL 5 color commands support the appl
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The PCL language also allows users to use patterns in combination with colors. These patterns and colors can be combined with text, vector graphics, and images to create new, complex graphics objects. The PCL Print Model determines the logical operations (known as ROPs, Raster Operations) used to combine each part of the graphic object. PCL 5 Color Concepts This section describes some of the concepts and terminology of color science related to the PCL 5 color commands. Color Color is a co
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Color can be described in ways other than amounts of red, green, and blue light. Generally, these color specification systems are known as color spaces. For example, The Cyan, Magenta, Yellow (CMY) color space is used to describe colors that are printed by depositing varying amounts of these three ink pigments (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow). The absence of pigment is considered to be white, and the presence of all three is black. The CMYK color space is similar to the CMY color space, but black
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Note HP’s ICC profiles are available through normal HP software distribution channels. For those who want the additional control available through building their own ICC profiles, there are several vendors of profiling tools available. To provide access to the printer's pure primaries and entire available printer gamut, the Vivid mode may be used when profiling the printer, and subsequently when using the ICC workflow. However, there are a broad range of users that do not require this lev
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Palettes and Color Selection The PCL 5 language allows the user to define a palette of colors. Each color is specified by three quantities or values which are interpreted depending on the color space. For example, the color white in an RGB palette is (1, 1, 1) while this set of values in a CMY palette defines the color black. Each color in the palette is accessed using an index number, starting with 0 as the first color in the palette. The largest palette holds 256 colors, which is approxi
