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Hi. I am an old gent who bought software in the 80s. I have been the voluntary Librarian for my county archaeological society for many years. I have the book catalogue (2500+ items) on early Paradox . This only prints to LPT1 direct to the printer (an old HPG55 in this case) OR into a file. I have written a program which resolves the coding in the database and produced the print commands. Previously I have printed out 60+ A4 pages, scanned to .jpg and converted to .pdf. A big job.
QUESTION. Do you have, in your back catalogue perhaps, or know of, a program that will read the file, the HP language convert the escape codes etc and prepare the text into any modern format eg. Microsoft or OpenOffice document or better still a .pdf directly? OR into any intermediate step along the way. (eg. dBase).
That would be a great help to me, please help of you can.. Thanks. Ray Marjoram. [Moderator deleted private information. Please do not post private information like e-mails and phone numbers]
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You've posted in the forum for Adobe Stock. This is a service where Adobe licenses photography to designers.
I am pretty sure there is no correct forum, though, as Adobe never made any app to read PCL or other printer languages other than PostScript.
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I moved this to the lounge as this is the place to discuss anything that does not fit in other fora. Maybe a user in this forum knows an answer.
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I don't know if this will help you. This software claims to convert Paradox data to XLS, CSV, SQL, XML, Txt, HTML, etc...
https://www.dbf2002.com/paradox-converter/
Disclaimer: I've never used it.
Hope that helps.
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Looks like adinosaur as it supports even OpenVMS and it is probably not in an acceptable price range... http://www.visual.co.uk/pcl2pdf.html
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No need to pay for a Paradox DB file viewer:
http://www.sportamok.com/development/delphi/8-paradox-dbase-reader
It reads Paradox files, and outputs these as Excel for import into either LibreOffice (the improved off-shoot of OpenOffice) or MS Office.
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Hi Sportamok
Thank you or your reply to my request on Adobe. It is nice to know of
this reader.
However my problem is a bit different. I have Paradox 3.5 and, in
particular a large library book catalogue with various internal codes.
I have written a program in Paradox which formats and writes the sorted
catalogue into over 60 A4 two-column pages resolving the escape codes on
the way but only via LPT1 to the printer or file. I would like to read
this file and get it to produce a document at best a pdf. If you know of
such or can make a suggestion then please do.
Many thanks.
--
Regards
Ray Marjoram
[Moderator deleted private information. Please do not post private information like e-mails and phone numbers]
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Paradox 3.5 - that means you are still running this in DOS?
Perhaps this might be a work-around:
https://github.com/Wengier/dosbox-x-wiki/wiki/Guide%3ASetting-up-printing-in-DOSBox%E2%80%90X
Run Paradox in DosBox-X, and print to a PostScript file, which is easily converted to a PDF.