Re: CCSID - getting the correct character to pc/printer

Yes, these commands are generated from the AS400 to a spool file. Just as
an example, the following line in the spool file which should read as :
      open "AUTOEXEC.BAT" for output as #1
With a Client access terminal session, when I look at the spool file, it
looks as :
      open "AUTOEXEC.BAT" for output as [1

This generates an error when being interpreted by the printer's programming
language.
One funny fact, I have just found that one out, is that another programmer,
whose user profile's CCSID is the same as mine, but who uses Symtrax
terminal emulation program, correctly generates the command to the printer
i.e the characters don't get translated.
There are currently, 2 characters that get wrongly translated : $ and #
(going to £ and [ respectively)
So now I suppose that i need to tweak with Client Access's default ccsid
and ccsid of the user profile use for client access connection, in order to
translate the characters correctly. Else I would would probably need to
create, as you suggested, an appropriate WSCST object. By the way would
anyone know where is the syntax used for mapping characters when creating
WSCST objects documented ?


date: Tue, 25 Mar 2003 07:21:58 -0600
from: Vern Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: CCSID - getting the correct character to pc/printer

Are you putting these commands in with your program? Or are you using
standard stuff, like highlight and underline, etc.?  Host Print Transform
will usually take care of that. I worked at a place where we put PCL
strings into the spooled files. We ended up using Host Print Transform with
a custom WSCST. The problem was the escape character.

You could reverse engineer - see what translation table has a code point
with the codes you need, then figure out what EBCDIC character gets
converted to that. Or build you own translation table in the WSCST - that's
what we did. The company used to use a Decision Data terminal, which let
you specify a multi-character string that it would replace with another
string. But nothing in networks will do this.

HTH

Vern

At 02:39 PM 3/25/2003 +0400, you wrote:
>After FTPing a source file to a PC, it happens that there are some special
>characters that get converted. For example a "$" becomes a " £" .  I
>believe this has to do with the CCSID associated to the fields of the
>source file. For example, if the job's CCSID at the time of creation is
>297, then the CCSID will be 297. How can one prevent this character
>conversion. In fact our ultimate aim, is to send spool files via a remote
>outq to a printer's flash memory. As these spool files contain specific
>commands to be processed by the printer, and these commands contain
special
>characters such as the above, these keep getting converted and hence
cannot
>be processed by the printer.