Post by Pixel DreamHi Guys,
COuld you help me to covert for .PRN to .PCL file.
This quote comes from a PC Mag article: "The PRN file contains the same bytes of data that would have been sent to the selected printer had you not chosen to print to a file. Unless you have access to that printer or an identical one, there's not much you can do with the PRN file."
So, if you know what type of printer was selected when the .PRN file was created, you might be able to find a program that will convert it to a PCL file by using Google to do a web search for such a converter program, but I cannot tell you how likely it would be that such a program exists.
If this is not a one-time problem, that is, you regularly must create a .PRN file and then convert it to PCL, then perhaps you could change the workflow a bit to eliminate the problem. For example, you might install a driver for a PCL printer, select that driver when producing the file, and select the print to file option (assuming that printer's driver offers that option), then the PRN file might be exactly what you need. Or you could install one of the free print-to-PDF programs, use the pseudo printer that program installs as the printer when creating the file, and that would produce a PDF file. You could then use Adobe Reader to open the PDF file and print it, if printing the file is the ultimate goal, or it might be easy to find a converter program that would convert from PDF files to PCL files.
Of course, if you do not create the file, but it is sent to you by someone else, you might not be able to get them to change how they create the file. In that case, I imagine the only course you have would be to ask what printer the PRN file was prepared for, and search for a converter from that printer's format to PCL.
Have you looked at the contents of the PRN file to see whether it happens to be something very simple? It might contain just plain ASCII text with CR LF characters to separate the lines, and maybe some FF characters to skip to the top of the page. If the file was intended to be distributed to other places, they might have chosen such a very basic printer so it was easy to interpret the contents. If so, you could probably write your own pretty simple program to read the file and print its contents (and select a PCL printer as the output when using that program), or there probably are free converters to convert such a simple PRN file to PCL.