Printing again (tearing my hair out)

Friends, Colleagues, Fellow Programmers:

The more research I do into AS/400 printing, the more bewildered I get.
I find myself swaying back and forth between doing my
totally-host-resident mail-merge in ILE C, and doing it in Java, and
finding new obstacles at every turn, and I haven't written a single line
of code yet. If I keep swaying back and forth like this, I'm bound to
get seasick.

At the moment, I'm back to Java, but finding that practically everything
I can find about printing is based on the assumption that one is using
the Toolbox classes, and they in turn appear to insist on having all the
overhead of a Toolbox-based client-server environment even when
EVERYTHING takes place on the AS/400.

Is there a simple, straightforward way to generate a spool file from a
Java application running entirely on the AS/400, using IPDS, AFPDS, or
even the OfficeVision extensions to SCS, WITHOUT any excess baggage,
WITHOUT requiring end-users to buy additional licensed programs, and
WITHOUT requiring them to be on anything higher than V4R2? Or
alternately, is there a way to do it from ILE C, without the AFP Toolkit?

I'm beginning to think somebody in Rochester is deliberately making it
difficult to print typographically-nontrival documents on the AS/400.

--
James H. H. Lampert
Professional Dilettante