7.0

7.2 Emulation
What is an emulation and what emulations are available in PlanetPress Design?
Emulation is the process by which PlanetPress Design imitates the behavior of a line printer by using a process
that reads the data and replicates the data pages that would have been printed on such a printer. The
emulation can replicate the behavior of a line printer using ASCII formatted data or channel skip data.
In PlanetPress Design, other emulations are available, though they are not actually emulating an existing
process. The ASCII, CSV, database, and, most recently, XML emulations handle data in a unique way.
Various emulation specific options can be set for most emulations, with the exception of the line printer and
database emulations. All emulations, except the database and XML emulations, also let you perform
operations on the data to stabilize it, such as add and remove characters or lines.
The sample data file you associate with the document, the emulation you select and the PPD you associate
with the document define how your document handles its input data, and consequently determine the
accuracy of the output the document produces with the data stream it receives at runtime. If you alter any of
these settings, you should verify the change does not compromise the output accuracy of the output.
7.2.1 Line Printer Emulation
Line printer emulation tells the document to treat the input data as data destined for a line printer.
In this emulation, a form feed signals the end of a data page. If no form feed occurs in the data stream, the
emulation adds lines to the data page buffer until the buffer is full.
Line printer emulation offers the best overall performance of all the emulations.
7.2.2 PDF Emulation
PDF Emulations allow you to capture data from fully composed documents in a PDF format.
PDF Emulation slightly differs from other PlanetPress Suite emulations: with other emulations, data is read
either one line at a time or one character at a time, while PDF emulation processes the input data from the
PDF file in such a fashion that every PDF page becomes a full data page. Each PDF page is thus graphically
represented in the PlanetPress Design Data Pane as one data page.
Note that protected PDF and PDF of versions above 1.7 are not supported by PlanetPress Suite 7.
7.2.3 ASCII Emulation
ASCII emulation tells the document to treat the input data as a stream of ASCII characters. The document
reads the data stream one character at a time, constructs a line, and adds that line to the data page buffer.
In this emulation, you can define how the document handles carriage returns that are not followed by line
feeds and how it handles tabs. You can also define whether you want the document to remove any Hewlett
Packard Printer Control Language (HP PCL) escape sequences it encounters.
If you use an ASCII emulation, you need to know if your printer supports binary mode as this is the
recommended mode for ASCII emulation. On printers that support binary mode, you can switch the printer to
binary mode using the printer keypad or by sending the appropriate PostScript code to the printer.
In binary mode, the printer reads the end of line characters (carriage return [CR], line feed [LF], and carriage
return followed by a line feed [CRLF]) as they appear in the data stream and does not perform any
substitution. A printer that does not support binary mode or is not running in binary mode replaces any CR,
LF, or CRLF that appears at the end of a line of data with a LF.
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