Re: [LINUX5250] scs2pdf thoughts

[Frank Richter <frichter@xxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2002 at 04:07:39AM -0600, Scott Klement wrote:

> On Sun, 10 Mar 2002, Tony Lambley wrote:
> >
> > There may already be an easy way of doing scs2pdf. It's occurred to me that
> > you can create a remote outq on the 400 to LPR the spooled file to your nix
> > box running LPD, which can then generate your PDFs via a ghostscript filter
> > in printcap.
>
> Ghostscript produces non-searchable PDFs.  When we were discussing
> "ps2pdf", that's what we were talking about.  ps2pdf is a shell script
> that comes with ghostscript, it calls gs with the appropriate
> parms to make a PDF.

I seriously doubt that ghostscript produces non-searchable PDFs all the
time. I use HPT with lpr from out AS-400 (V4R3, also tested with V3R7)
and ghostscript 6.50.

The output is quite good and *searchable*.

My filter actually looks like this:

----
#!/bin/sh
OUTFILE=/var/tmp/as400topdf-`date +'%Y-%m-%d'`-$$
recode -f ibmpc..l1 | \
enscript --no-header -p- -q -fCourier-Bold@6.6/9.4 > $OUTFILE.ps
ps2pdf $OUTFILE.ps $OUTFILE.pdf

# TODO: we should get the userid sending the job and not make
# everything world readable.
chmod 644 $OUTFILE.pdf

rm $OUTFILE.ps
----

The AS-400 OUTQ uses WSCST QSYS/QWPDEFAULT in order to get a simple
ascii output without any ESC-sequences for various printer models.

--
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Frank Richter, Leiter EDV
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E-Mail: frichter@esda.com