-lj4BoundFont
Indicate whether a target PCL printer supports unbound or only bound fonts.
Syntax
-lj4BoundFont Y|N
or often in the relevant .prt file as
<BoundFont>Yes</BoundFont> or No
Description
The PCL reference manual says:
"The terms 'bound' and 'unbound' refer to the symbol set capacity of a font. A bound font identifies a font which is restricted (bound) to a single symbol set. An unbound font (or unbound typeface) indicates the capacity to be bound a set of symbols selected from a complementary symbol index (such as the Master Symbol List, or the Unicode symbol index."
In DocOrigin terms, a "bound font" is a PCL font that spans only a single PCL symbol set (up to 256 characters). This is determined at Merge time – essentially hard-coded into the font that is sent to the printer. A further limitation (a DocOrigin limitation) is that we always include the first 128 ASCII characters in this count, so in fact, the DocOrigin limit is 128 "extended characters".
An 'unbound font' allows any number of characters in the font (so, greater than 256).
In practice, this means that most English and European languages can be downloaded as either bound or unbound (because there tends to be less than 128 non-ASCII characters involved). But Asian languages such as Chinese are probably limited to being unbound fonts as most forms are going to use more than 128 Chinese glyphs (characters).
Why does this all matter?
By default, most DocOrigin supplied .prt files use unbound fonts. But there are some PCL printers that do NOT support unbound fonts. So when printing to those printers you must tell the DocOrigin PCL driver to use 'bound fonts'. Many printers such as the HP laser printers tend to support either.
Generally, unbound fonts are used by the default DocOrigin .prt output configurations. You can change that by setting the <BoundFont>Yes</BoundFont> option in a custom DocOrigin .prt file, or via the command line override of -LJ4BoundFont Y option.
vs -useBuiltinSS
The -usebuiltinss=Y option tells us to believe that the target printer has the standard symbolsets that are built into DocOrigin via the Default-DOPclSymbolSets.ss file. By saying yes, DocOrigin doesn't have to download the symbolset mapping tables, so the PCL is a bit smaller and tighter. Our default .ss file has the basic symbolsets that are defined in the PCL spec, so they all should be in the printer – but who knows with some of the quasi-clones.
With a Bound font the symbolset is built into the download font info, so the symbolset and its font info come as a "bound" -lj4BoundFont set. With unbound fonts, the font itself has no symbolset info, just a bunch of Unicode characters. DocOrigin has to supply a symbolset to map 0-255 into those Unicode characters.
