ggodderi
thanks! Thats three printers down.
SamKnows posted in the other thread that the 85-font set will continue to be supported. If there is a way to know for sure which series of printers (f.ex all Pro printers? All P3xxx but maybe not all P2xxx? etc) that helps. He also posted that the Pro series support the downloadble soft fonts, formats 0, 10, 11,20,15 and 16, with plans to retain the capability.
Although it wasn't stated that _every_ Pro that supports PCL5 will have the full 85 font set, it sure sounds like that is the case and if so then any of the Pro series LaserJets or MFPs (that mention PCL5, I'm still going to be cautious) should meet the customers' needs.
I doubt our remaining customers are going to be in the market for enterprise-class printers (though its not impossible since they used them in the past) but I did get one person at HP to tell me about a year ago that if those specified PCL5 in the docs or specs that they would be fully compliant and compatible with PCL that printed on an HP5Si printer or equivalent
The remaining low end printers are still at issue.
I did find one reference from 2008 that four LaserJet P2015 printers, whose presales info said it was PCL5 compliant, had to be replaced at a customer site (with 2430s). The only reference we could find said that there were 45 scalable fonts. Turns out that was for PCL6. PS got 35 scalable fonts, and PCL5 only got 11 plus 11 lineprinter fonts.
None of the 11 scalable fonts available to PCL5 had proportional spacing. Only fixed pitch. This made it unusable for practically all of our customers except for line report printing (no forms, no invoices, no BOLs). We also had problems getting the bitmap font used for MICR to load, and I believe the font used for logo printing, but I haven't found the details on the errors. These are font files that worked perfectly from a LaserJet 4 up to current P3xxx and P4xxx series, and presumably (though I don't have one to try) a current Pro series.
I know that we had issues with P16xx printers also but have not found the references to what they were.
The result of the two printers being unsuitable despite being described as PCL5 compatible basically made it impossible for us to provide recommendations to customers unless we could get HP to tell us very specifically that the printers were FULL PCL5 printers and not restricted like the P2015, or if the customer was willing to spend the money to get a departmental class printer (P3xxx or better, even for a low volume invoice printer) where we actually never ran into the restricted PCL5 (but again could not know that for a fact until we either got hands on one or took the risk because we never could get HP presales to tell us up front).
Rich