Re: Re: scs2ps

On Tue, 12 Mar 2002, James Rich wrote:
>
> Yikes - non-latin1 characters!  But I think it should work fine.  The most
> likely problem is that we map EBCDIC to ASCII wrong for non-latin1.  But I
> think that tn5250_char_map_to_local() handles everything for us.  Could
> someone who uses special characters give this a try?  I remember reading
> about handling special characters in a PDF, but it might already work
> fine.
>

tn5250_char_map_to_local() allows you to tell it which map you want to
use.  It appears to work okay, at least for tn5250.

However, in the scs2xxx programs, we've got a line at the top of
the main() function that looks like this:
         map = tn5250_char_map_new ("37");

So, it appears that scs2ascii, scs2ps and scs2pdf are all hardcoded to
codepage 37 -- which will probably be less-than-ideal for international
use.

The ideal solution would be for lp5250d to somehow pass the correct map
info to scs2pdf and friends.  Maybe it should set an environment variable?
That way, you could set the variable yourself if you wanted to call
scs2xxx directly.   This sounds better to me than a command-line argument.

Using this shell-variable approach, this is how your config would look:

printer {
    host = as400
    env.DEVNAME=foo
    map=297
    outputcommand= scs2pdf > /home/bar/as400pdf-$$.pdf
}


Using the "command-line argument" approach, it would look more like this:

printer {
    host = as400
    env.DEVNAME=foo
    map=297
    outputcommand = scs2pdf map=297 > /home/bar/as400pdf-$$.pdf
}

It just seems more intuitive to not have to specify the map in two
different places.