In this case, the user has to do the processing on the input to be printed, stipulating the way he wants it to be finally printed. The objective of the exercise is to make the printer print as the user wants to. The printing finally boils down to putting pixels on the page. It is not a trivial exercise for a user to convert each character to PCL before sending it to the printer. Thus there evolves a need for a utility that can handle the conversion.
Users can access such printers only via a spooler.
The spool file has a link to the spooler. But these are serial printers and support serial ports only. Putting these printers on the network requires a JetDirect card, which supports only parallel ports. There are several PCL-based printers that can be used as network printers. These printers use the Dimm card to convert Big5 characters to fonts for printing.