Set page scaling in PJL

Question

I have to write a functionality that takes a PDF-document and sends it to a printer with some PJL commands. So far so good, I take the document, convert it to Postscript, send the postscript file to the printer with the required commands and the printer prints the document.

Now to the actual problem: Most of the document that needs to be printed by our software are invoices, therefore they are carefully made, such that every element is precisely positioned, and if it's off by millimeters the printed document is invalid. When printing the document directly through Adobe or any pdf viewing software, I can select the actual size option and everything is fine. Although if I print it via C# and PJL the document has different margins depending on the printer it has been printed on. Until now we used pdfprinting.net, and that option could be selected through pdfPrint.Scale = PdfPrint.ScaleTypes.None, but how can I do it via PJL?

// This are all the commands that I've tried, none of which achieved what I need
var parameters = new Dictionary<string, string>
{
    { "SET USERNAME",userName},
    //{"SET PAPER", "A4" },
    //{"SET MEDIATYPE", "PAPER" },
    //{"SET TOPMARGIN", "TM6MM" },
    //{"SET PRINTAREA", "INKEDAREA" },
    {"SET MARGINS", "SMALLER" },
    //{ "ENTER LANGUAGE","PDF"},
    { "ENTER LANGUAGE","POSTSCRIPT"},
};

var documentText = "\x1B%-12345X@PJL JOB NAME=" + jobName + " DISPLAY=" + jobDisplay;
foreach (var parameter in parameters)
{
    documentText += "\r\n@PJL " + parameter.Key + "=" + parameter.Value;
}

documentText += "\r\n";
documentText += pdfString;
documentText += "\r\n\x0D\x0A\x1B%-12345X\r\n";

RawPrint(printerAddress, documentText, documentName);
// RawPrint() calls the printer methods found in 'winspool.drv', imported via 'DllImport'

Answer 1

Checking the PJL Reference Manual (Edition 12, which is the latest I have seen) there is simply no way to scale the page content in PJL.

Even if there were, I'd be surprised if it carried over to the PostScript (as opposed to PCL) interpreter environment, because PostScript has a rich feature set to handle this sort of setup. So basically you're going to need to get the PostScript correct.

Now, when you take a PDF file and produce PostScript from it, you are almost certainly producing generic PostScript; its device-neutral so it doesn't take account of aspects of the physical device.

Most obviously this will be things like hardware margins and unprintable areas. Many devices have limitations on which parts of the media they can print on, due to the paper handling. These will, of course, be different between different printers.

Of course, when you print from the operating system, the printer device driver knows what the printable area of the media is (because its the specific driver for the printer in question), and so it can arrange for the content to be scaled to the actual media.

Ghostscript certainly can produce PostScript (using the ps2write device) which is suitably scaled and translated for a given printer, provided you know what the characteristics of that printer are. In fact if the printer is sophisticated enough, the PostScript program may be able to interrogate the printer to retrieve some of these characteristics (ImagingBBox, PageOffset, Margins, ImageShift) and its then possible to write a PostScript program to dynamically resize the content of the page, based on these values (the PostScript produced by ps2write does not do this...).