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HPGL, sometimes hyphenated as HP-GL, is the primary printer control language used by Hewlett-Packard plotters. The name is an initialism for Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language. It later became a standard for almost all plotters. Hewlett-Packard's printers also usually support HPGL in addition to PCL. A page description language (PDL) is a language that describes the appearance of a printed page in a higher level than an actual output bitmap. ...
The Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), commonly known as HP, is a very large, global company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. ...
For other uses, see Plot. ...
Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations formed from the initial letter or letters of words, such as NATO and XHTML, and are pronounced in a way that is distinct from the full pronunciation of what the letters stand for. ...
A computer printer, or more commonly a printer, produces a hard copy (permanent human-readable text and/or graphics) of documents stored in electronic form, usually on physical print media such as paper transparencies. ...
Printer Command Language, more commonly referred to as PCL, is a Page description language (PDL) developed by HP as a printer protocol and has become a de facto industry standard. ...
The language is formed from a series of two letter codes, followed by optional parameters. For instance an arc can be drawn on a page by sending the string:
AA100,100,50;
This means Arc Absolute, and the parameters place the center of the arc at 100,100 on the page, with a starting angle of 50 degrees measured counter-clockwise. A fourth optional parameter (not used here) specifies how far the arc continues, and defaults to 5 degrees.
Typical HPGL files started with a few setup commands, followed by a long string of graphics commands. For instance:
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An example HPGL file | Command | Meaning | | IN; | initialize, start a plotting job | | IP; | set the initial point (origin), in this case the default 0,0 | | SC0,100,0,100; | set the scale so the page is 0 to 100 in both X and Y directions | | SP1; | select pen 1 | | PU0,0; | move pen to starting point for next action | | PD100,0,100,100,0,100,0,0; | put down the pen and move to the following locations (draw a box around the page) | | PU50,50; | lift the pen and move to 50,50 | | CI25; | draw a circle with radius 25 | | SS; | select the standard font | | DT*,1; | set the text delimiter to the asterisk, and don't print them (the 1, meaning "true") | | PU20,80; | lift the pen and move to 20,80 | | LBHello World*; | draw a label | The coordinate system was based on the smallest units one of their plotters could support, and was set to 25 µm (i.e. 40 units per millimeter, 1016 per inch). The coordinate space was positive or negative floating point numbers, specifically ±230. A millimetre (American spelling: millimeter), symbol mm is an SI unit of length that is equal to one thousandth of a metre. ...
An inch (plural: inches; symbol or abbreviation: in or, sometimes, ″ - a double prime) is the name of a unit of length in a number of different systems, including English units, Imperial units, and United States customary units. ...
A floating-point number is a digital representation for a number in a certain subset of the rational numbers, and is often used to approximate an arbitrary real number on a computer. ...
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