GhostPCL, part of the larger GhostPDL project, is software that converts PCL files into PostScript, PDF, and other formats. The project is derived from, and shares much code with, GPL Ghostscript. Prebuilt Win32 and OS X binaries of GhostPCL are surprisingly hard to find, so I have provided my own builds of the Win32 versions of pcl6.exe and pspcl6.exe and the OS X versions of pcl6 and pspcl6. All of these are built from GhostPCL version 9.05, with the source code unchanged. The binaries are self-contained (they include the required fonts), and no additional files are needed.
For the W32 binaries, download this GhostPCL-W32-Binaries.zip archive. (You may also want older versions, based on GhostPCL 8.71, available in a separate archive.) These were built with Visual C++ 2008 Express, with no special configuration of any kind.
For the OS X binaries, download this GhostPCL-OSX-Binaries.zip archive. The binaries will run on 10.6 "Snow Leopard" or later only. These were built under OS X 10.6, following the instructions included with the source code.
Note: These binaries were updated on 8 May 2012 to use GhostPCL 9.05, replacing versions built from 9.01.
GhostPCL with Dark Courier: I have also built special versions of GhostPCL 9.05 in which the default Courier font is HP's "Dark Courier" instead of the lighter version of Courier found in the default GhostPCL font set. The lighter version is also available in the special version. The dark font is named CourierHP; the light font is simply Courier. You may want to experiment with these special versions. They may be downloaded as GhostPCL-Dark-W32-Binaries.zip and GhostPCL-Dark-OSX-Binaries.zip.
GhostPCL is documented here, but the documentation is somewhat sparse. If you want to create a PDF file from a PCL file, use this syntax, and when typing the command-line switches, be careful to follow all the capitalization exactly:
pcl6 -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=c:\test.pdf c:\test.pcl
Of course, these programs come with absolutely no guarantee that they will work correctly or even that they will work at all. If you have problems with these downloads, please get in touch with me via this page. Also feel free to get in touch with me if you need binaries for the versions of these programs that convert XPS into PostScript or PDF.
If you find these binaries useful, please visit this page and send a contribution toward my WordPerfect for DOS Updated web site.
Edward Mendelson (em thirty-six [at] columbia [dot] edu, but with two initials and two numerals before the [at] sign, not spelled out as shown here).