RE: Spooled File Reader Project on Sourceforge.net

SCS is an OLD printer control stream intended for driving belt or band impact printers. As I recall SCS stood for Synchronous Character Stream or something like that. Most of the RPG printer control entries are related directly to the SCS stream. So this tool would allow you to take spooled files written by legacy RPG applications and put them out directly as PDF. Most of the other techniques involve copying the spool file to a physical file and then using the physical file as the basis for producing the pdf.

One technique often used with impact printers for bolding is to print the line twice (overstrike). On an impact printer, this made the text bolder. It has absolutely no effect on a laser printer. Apparently this project recognizes that and makes the switch to a bold font when it sees an overstrike of the same character string.

There are several SCS classes in JT400 (JTOPEN) that support SCS stream output including SCS5256Writer. Looking at those classes will give you a pretty good idea of the protocol. I haven't found a protocol document, yet.


-----Original Message-----
From: java400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:java400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen
Sent: Saturday, November 20, 2010 5:36 AM
To: Java Programming on and around the IBM i
Subject: Re: Spooled File Reader Project on Sourceforge.net

Den 19/11/10 13.46, Schmidt, Mihael skrev:

Hi,

I just noticed an interesting project on Sourceforge.net:
http://scsreader.sourceforge.net

From the web site:

SCS Reader is an OSGI compatible Java library which is able to read, parse and transform SCS (SNA Character String) data streams. The implementation also offers some converters to transform such streams into Text, PDF, RTF or other formats. At the current state it supports all features of the SCS 5256 printer standard.

It says it emulates a physical printer allowing for detecting bold text etc, and can create a PDF out of it.

I am not familiar with the SCS 5256 standard, so is there anybody who can explain in what situation a user would benefit from this?

Thanks