Re: scs2ps -- LINUX5250

Thanks for your kind response, Jay, and for your offer of including it in 
the development branch.  I would be pleased if you would.  Some comments 
below...

Some commentary looking over the patch:

>- scs2ps_transparent(): doesn't escape backslashes and parentheses.  If

The answer is that the transparent command (to me) means: Send these bytes 
to the printer exactly as they are.  Do not try to do anything at all with 
them, except feed them to the output file.  In the context of scs2ps, that 
means that whoever uses the transparent command is going to send an 
appropriate ascii postscript snippet of code.

>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.)

Right.

>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?

Currently, I see that scs2ascii hard codes page 37 for all character 
translation. I haven't went any further than this yet.  Postscript does 
have facilities for managing even double byte character sets, although I 
haven't exactly used them yet.

>- Is there some way to have the AS/400 tell _us_ the paper size for this
>job?

I suspect that SCS may not be able to tell us the paper size (Letter, 
Legal, A4) - SCS after all was a format invented for line printers - but I 
think it can tell us the number of lines per page and number of characters 
per line.  Currently it's hardcoded just like scs2ascii.  Something I think 
will change soon.

>- 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?

SCS is what we get if we create a remote outq, and say 
TRANSFORM(*No).  It's a generic, least common denominator line printer 
format.  scs2ps is valuable to me, as I can quickly use ghostview, or lpr 
it to my postscript printer.  Since scs2ps shrinks the output to fit on the 
page, I'm also sure that one line of data appears on one line on the output 
page.  No more messing with wrapping, or truncating.

>- 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?

Umm.  Wow.  As long as it's easy...


Best Regards,
Rich

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