RE: RPG Word Mail Merge

In my case our users what two destinations for all documents. Paper to send in the mail and an electronic version available to the student who the letter was to and any employee who needs proof the letter was sent and what it said. Web viewing by both parties but the option to reprint the letter by an employee. We also have the need to have a user department able to change the text of the letter frequently. Word is probably not the best choice for viewing by a diverse group since Word is not used by everyone. Some of our newer students have never used anything but Google Docs in High School. PDF is probably best for storage and web viewing. I have a WYSISYG editor for web apps that stores HTML code and have considered using that for our end users to maintain the text of the letter and tell them what to enter for replacement parameters. Then it is a fairly easy job to scan/replace the HTML to do the mail merge. Making the HTML file print on paper gets to be a bit of an issue with multi page letters and sometimes 6,000 letters generated in a job.

-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Scott Klement
Sent: Friday, September 10, 2010 3:13 PM
To: RPG programming on the IBM i / System i
Subject: Re: RPG Word Mail Merge

I would write a short PC program that uses ShellExecute() on the document, telling it to print. Then I'd launch that program from the i,if that's what you need.

However, if your goal is to PRINT from the i, then I really don't see why you're using Word format. Why not just have your RPG program print the data to begin with?

Word makes sense if you plan to give the result to a user who wants to
open it up in Word. But it makes very little sense if "paper" is your
destination, and no PC is involved. (just IMHO)

On 9/10/2010 1:15 PM, Mike Cunningham wrote:

After the XML is resaved what would be the easiest way to actually
print the XML? Would you need to launch Word on a PC from RPG and tell
it to load the XML file and print?

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