Re: scs2ascii is broken?

On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, James Rich wrote:
>
> > TRANSPARENT are codes that OS/400 wants you to send to your printer
> > without translating or interpreting them.
> >
> > I'm not sure that TRANSPARENT is very useful in the PS or PDF context.
>
> Ok, you are probably right here.  To make them mean anything to postscript
> or pdf we would probably have to write a PCL printer driver, and I think
> that would be the wrong approach.  So for scs2ps and scs2pdf sending
> TRANSPARENT codes to stderr is probably the right thing to do.  Do you
> agree?

Hmmm...  I'm always leery about simply discarding data.   And, in this
case, writing to stderr it pretty much the same as discarding it :)

Unless it causes problems, I'd write the data to the PDF or PS document
as-is.  That way, someone could write code on the iSeries (using WSCST,
etc) that allowed them to insert their own custom PDF features or
PostScript features that wouldn't be otherwise available.

So, I guess I'd just write the TRANSPARENT data to the file, as-is, no
translation or interpretation....

> I'm thinking I will put together a test suite to validate changes to cvs.
> I have some great test files Frank Richter sent me and I have some of my
> own, perhaps you (Scott) wouldn't mind sending me the raw scs output of
> some of your nonconfidential reports?  Then I'll know together a shell
> script that will run all three scs -> whatever programs on the test files
> and make verification a little easier.  I'll make jpegs or something of
> what the output should look like so that the generated output can be
> compared.  Thoughts?
>

I don't think that's really necessary.  I am reviewing each of the patches,
and trying them out before committing them.  Granted, that one slipped
through the cracks -- but bugs will happen.

At least it was just me who ran into the problem. :)