RE: Creating PDF

On Saturday 03 May 2003 2:44 am, Tom Liotta wrote:
> midrange-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> >  12. Re: Creating PDF  (Shannon O'Donnell)
> >
> >$230?  For ONE! utility! That's insane!  You can buy the entire Adobe
> >Acrobat software suite, which comes with a free SDK so that you can
> > write your own code, AND you have access to all the other tools that
> > are part of Adobe, for $249.
>
> You wouldn't happen to have Adobe's pricing for their iSeries version,
> would you? I've only seen Windows and Macintosh.
>
> Sure, I'm pretty certain you weren't totally serious, but it's still a
> point worth exploring. I suspect even Adobe's prices would rise a bit
> if marketed for iSeries (or zSeries or...).

Comparing iSeries software to what on Windows is essentially a single user 
product is bound to show some price differences ;) iSeries software is 
closer to networked applications, which command a much higher price. A 
while back I looked at the prices of Adobe's Distiller product, to allow 
users to print documents as pdf from any application[1]. As I recall, the 
price was £6000 (GBP) for a 100 user license, and something like £11000 
for a site license. A site license for $230 (like we would have for all 
of our iSeries users using SPLTOOL) would be quite a steal! 

We bought the commercial version of Pete Clifford's CVTSPLSTMF 
(CoolSpools/400) as it handles *AFPDS reports as well as *SCS[2] (I think 
Brad's tool is limited to *SCS). That's 10x the price of SPLTOOL on our 
P40 box, but it's easily paid for itself. We're switching more and more 
reports from snail mail to email so the benefit we get keeps increasing. 

Regards, Martin
[1] In the end I opted for a Linux box running Samba and the ghostscript 
utilities to 'print' incoming requests to pdf, collectable from a file 
share on the same box. As it reused an older PC no longer in use, the 
costs (other than a bit of my time) was zero :)
[2] I had a working Linux solution for *SCS to pdf, using a combination of 
CPYSPLF, CPYTOSTMF & some custom code on the 400 and enscript & 
ghostscript on the Linux box, but I couldn't see how to extend that to 
*AFPDS. Also CoolSpools does report splitting which makes it a lot more 
versatile.
-- 
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