I'm trying to convert PDFs to PCL (using ghostscript, but I'd love to hear alternative suggestions), and every driver (ghostscript device), including all of the built-ins and gutenprint generate PCL files many times larger than the input PDF. (This is the problem - I need my PCL to be about as small as the input).
Given that the text doesn't show up in the PCL file, I guess that Ghostscript is rasterizing the text. Is there a way to prevent GS generally, or just gutenprint, from doing that? I'd rather either have it embed the fonts, or not even embed the fonts (leave it to the printer to render the fonts)?
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any documentation on this point.
There are 3 (I think) types of font in PCL. There are rendered bitmaps, TrueType fonts (in later versions) and the HPGL stick font.
PDF and PostScript Have type 1, 2 (CFF), 3 and 42 (TrueType, but not the same as PCL) and CIDFonts based on any of the preceding types.
The only font type the two have in common is TrueType, so in order to retain text, any font which was not TrueType would have top be converted into TrueType. This is not a simple task. So Ghostscript simply renders the text, which is guaranteed to work.
PDF is, in general, a much richer format than PCL< there are many PDF constructs (fonts, shading, stroke/fill in a single operation, transparency) which cannot be represented in PCL. So its entirely possible that the increase in size is nothing to do with text and fonts.
In fact, I believe that the PXL drivers in Ghostscript simply render the entire page to a bitmap at the required resolution, and then wrap that up with enough PCL to be successfully sent to a printer. (I could be mistaken on this point though)
Basically, you are not going to get PCL of a similar size to your PDF out of Ghostscript.