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On Mon, 24 Oct 2005, Simonse, Arco (CMK) wrote:
For email we are using Giovanni Perotti's MMAIL, and our faxsolution is Hylafax, located on a linuxbox.
Our fax solution is also hylafax on linux, and it works wonderfully.
What will be the best document formatting language to create the first (main) output of an application that can be converted to other formats _on the iSeries itselves_ ? APFDS, Postscript, PCL, HTML or other?
Because we want to email, print, and fax documents, our choice has been to use postscript. We have postscript printers which are cheaper than IPDS printers. Postscript converts easily to pdf. For email we have an out queue connected to lp5250d (from the tn5250 project) which converts postscript to pdf on the fly. The resulting pdf is placed on our file server for easy attachment to email. And of course hylafax faxes postscript documents with ease, so no troubles there.
We don't have much demand to view printed output in a web browser, so html has not been a consideration. If it were, we would probably just convert the postscript to pdf as pdf viewers are cheap and plentiful.
Writing postscript files is more work than AFPDS but very well worth it in my opinion. The hardware is cheaper, you have more choice of hardware, and the resulting output looks much nicer. As well, postscript is a programming language in its own right, so it is quite powerful. As well, there are many, many postscript post- and pre-processors that you can use to do things you can't do with afpds, such as printing "SAMPLE" underneath the text on every page. I also prefer the development process of postscript better than AFPDS. By that I mean I can edit the postscript file with a plain text editor and see the results immediately using ghostscript, whereas with AFPDS I have to create the overlay in one progam, then import it, then run the print program that creates the spooled file, then print the spooled file. Way too much work and wasted paper when you are trying to get thing to line up just perfect.
I have been working with postscript output and hylafax a lot recently. I've designed my print programs such that the coding for postscript is very similar to the way one would code a regular external printfile. If you have any questions at all feel free to ask me - it is all on my brain lately :)
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