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Word's Print field lets you insert printer commands to send to the printer directly, without the print driver trying to send them as text. Word's help file explains how to enter PostScript commands well enough. It also says that the feature works with Hewlett-Packard's PCL, but it doesn't explain how to enter the PCL commands, which use the character 1B hex (the Escape character). How can you insert this character into the Print field?

Anna Richardson
via ZDNet

You're absolutely right that the help for the Print field in Word (both Word 7 and Word 97) does a much better job of explaining how to use PostScript commands than how to use PCL commands. In particular, it leaves out this small but critical detail. Fortunately, the answer is simple.

The Escape character is 1B in hexadecimal, which translates to 27 in decimal. To add it to a Print field, simply type 27 without quotation marks. The sequence Esc E, for example, would translate to

27"E"

(with the text character surrounded by quotation marks), and the Print field would read

{print 27"E"}

If you aren't familiar with fields in Word, note that the open and close curly braces are not typed characters. Rather, they are field markers.

There are several ways to enter a field in Word, including the Insert | Field command, but the most straightforward (assuming you know the field name and options) is to enter it directly, as follows: Hit Ctrl-F9 to insert the field markers, and leave the cursor between them. You can then type the text of the field itself. With most fields, you would then hit F9 to let the field calculate results, but with the Print field, there's nothing to calculate. The field simply passes the commands to the printer.

If you're wondering why anyone would use the Print field, then you probably don't need it. One of this field's primary functions is to let you print the overlays stored in some printers.

In general, PCL-compatible printers let you store things like a signature, a letterhead, a company logo, or an electronic version of a form. The Print field lets you embed a command in a document to tell the printer to use a specific overlay with that document. For printers that are fully PCL 5-compatible, the command to print an overlay on every page, for example, is Esc&f#y4X, with # representing the stored overlay's ID number. (To turn off the overlay, substitute 5X for 4X.) If the ID number is 12, the command is Esc&f12y4X, and the Print field reads: {print 27"&f12y4X"}.

Finally, note that the Print field does not work correctly in the original version of Word 97 when it's running in Windows NT 4.0. If you're running Windows NT, you'll want to upgrade to Word's Service Release 1, better known as SR-1.

-- M. David Stone
From the 7/1/98 issue of PC Magazine

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