Remembering page state between print jobs

I recently committed several changes to cvs to vastly improve SCS support and PDF output support. It now follows the host's requests for page size, margins, and CPI, as well as a few other fixes for SCS codes we weren't handling before.

But I've run into a significant problem. Suppose you have a 17 CPI print job that is 198 columns wide. Because these are not the default sizes of 10 CPI and 80 columns the iSeries will send the Set Page Presentation Size command and a few other commands for font and margins. The scs code we now have will correctly parse these command and set the page size, fonts, and margins correctly. If when you print this job you save the spool file and then immediately send it again, the page size, font, and margin commands are not sent. The iSeries expects the printer to remember what the last settings were for these attributes. The iSeries only sends those parameters for print jobs whose attributes differ from the previous print job sent.

We do print processing via two components: lp5250d and the outputcommand parameter in ~/.tn5250rc of the print session (usually one of scs2ascci, scs2pdf, or scs2ps). lp5250d does not have any SCS code and simply passes on the print stream to the outputcommand via a pipe. Each time a print job is processed the command specified in outputcommand is started, attached to the pipe, and then exits when the job is complete. All the SCS processing is done in this second part. Because of this, the only programs that are aware of the current page size, fonts, and margins are scs2ascii, scs2pdf, and scs2ps. But because they exit at the end of each job, there is no way for them to remember what the page, font, and margin settings were from the previous job. So a job such as I described above would print incorrectly the second time it is sent to be printed.

lp5250d could potentially remember these attributes and pass them to scs2pdf as defaults. I've been experimenting with adding SCS code to lp5250d but so far I'm just duplicating all the work that is in scs.c and scs2pdf.c. Somehow I need to get lp5250d to know what these attributes are so it can remember them between print jobs.

One of my thoughts is to integrate the scs2* programs into lp5250d, but that would result in a big mess it seems like. Output format could be chosen via a command line switch.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Comments?

James Rich

It's not the software that's free; it's you.
- billyskank on Groklaw