Re: scs2ps

["Jason M. Felice" <jfelice@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rich Duzenbury wrote:
> 
> Thank you very kindly for the open source etiquette introduction.  I've
> taken your suggestions and created the appropriate (I believe) context
> diffs for the scs2ps patch.

Yup, they're good.

> 
> Since it is more than 200 lines of text, I posted to my web site at
> http://theduz.com/scs2ps.html.

Pretty snazzy.  A little more effort than I would have put into it, but
hey ;-)

> 
> There, you will be able to download the patch, and I have some sample
> instructions for installing it.  If you have any feedback, feel free to
> contact me via the list, or private e-mail to mailto:theduz@theduz.com.

Some commentary looking over the patch:

- scs2ps_transparent(): doesn't escape backslashes and parentheses.  If
the
  transparent order means the same thing in SCS as it does in 5250
(which I'm
  pretty sure it does), it is how you instruct the printer to print
characters
  which would otherwise be interpreted as escape sequences.
- Actually, this transparent data should be mapped using the character
map, but
  scs2ascii seems to be doing the same thing.  Mike!  Help!  Is this a
bug? I
  wonder what would happen if we printed some binary stuff.
- The PostScript document title would make a good command-line option.

scs2ascii seems to throw away font, emphasis, underlining, etc.  So I
guess you really do need the documentation.  Mike!  Help!  (I'm trying
to get his attention.)

I have some other (rhetorical?) questions/musings at this point:
- How does PostScript handle character sets?  Are we going to have to do 
  character set munging like tn5250 does?
- Is there some way to have the AS/400 tell _us_ the paper size for this
job?
- I just saw something that looks like an alternative to SCS for
  all-dot-addressable printers.  Is this a better protocol to capture
for
  PostScript?
- I'm thinking abstractly about having an lp5250d `filter' option, which
  determines whether to prefilter the output to the print command with
some
  pipe to a shell script (and lp5250d and the shell script would handle
the
  command line options).  So, for example, you'd say lp5250 filter=pdf
...,
  and lp5250d would look for /usr/libexec/tn5250/pdf.filter and run it.
  pdf.filter would look like:

#!/bin/sh
scs2ps "$@" |ps2pdf

  That way we could easily implement filter=fax, filter=ps,
filter=ascii,
filter=scs (just a passthrough filter), filter=tiff or whatever.  Does
this
make sense?

> 
> Best Regards,
> Rich
> 

I'll put this into the development CVS branch if you want.  My judgement
on this is that it is `no less functional than scs2ascii', and I have an
scs2ascii queue on a Linux box at a client site that has been up for the
life of the box (well until today, that was almost a year - *someone*
typed `shutdown' when logged into the wrong box hehe).

Thanks Rich,
-Jay 'Eraserhead' Felice
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