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.
A form feed signals the end of a data page in ASCII emulation. If no form feed occurs in the data stream, the emulation adds data to the data page buffer until the buffer is full.