Printer Control Language (PCL)

PCL, also known as HPLaserjet, is a language developed by Hewlett Packard for their range of printers. It is a language like Postscript but contains escape characters, so typing it on the terminal can cause problems. When trying out L^ATEX, if you had typed:-

dvihp -o example.hp example

instead of dvips the resulting example.hp would have been in PCL, which is a binary file.