What Is Printer Command Language (PCL)?

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Did you know that the language used to control your printer is named after a type of ancient Greek armor? PCL is an acronym for Printer Command Language. The name comes from Hewlett-Packard, initially developed in 1984 for its dot matrix and inkjet printers. It was designed to allow computers to communicate with these digital printers more efficiently and effectively than they could use other technologies. The PCL language has been updated several times. The most recent version is PCL 6. Printer Command Language (PCL) is a page description language (PDL) especially developed to effectively control printer features among various printing devices. Hewlett-Packard developed this language for dot matrix and inkjet printers in 1984 to make it easy for the computer to communicate with digital printers. Several versions have been released since then to offer compatibility with various models of printers. The latest version, PCL 6, was released in 2013. It has been designed to be backward compatible with PCL 5 and offers support for new features such as color management, PDF/X-1a:2001 support, improved font handling, and more. PCL is sometimes mistakenly considered an abbreviation for Printer Control Language, similar to another term related to page description language. The first version of PCL was developed in 1984 by Hewlett-Packard. It was designed to be an alternative to PostScript, which was at the time proprietary. At first, PostScript was only available on Apple computers and printers; PCL became famous when it was released for Microsoft Windows. In 1990, Hewlett-Packard released PCL5, which included printer commands for color printing and more advanced graphics capabilities. The next version of PCL was PCL6 in 1996; this version added support for non-English languages and included many new printer commands that enabled more advanced features such as watermarks and variable fonts.

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