>We heard that there is a program that strips out the PCL codes from a print file leaving only the ASCII text. Does anyone know of such a program.

I've not seen one; it'd be a PITA to write, since a PCL stream might well contain binary data rendering text as graphics when a font isn't directly supported by the printer itself, a common issue when TrueType or Windows fonts are used for some of the output. There are products that will extract ASCII from EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) but that isn't the same as PCL.