Re: scs2ascii is broken?

On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, James Rich wrote:
>
> > The TRANSPARENT order of scs2ascii appears to write everything to stderr
> > instead of stdout in the 0.17.x branch.
>
> Ah, this is a mistake made when the common functions were moved into
> scs.c.  I looked at the patch you made.  I wonder if scs_transparent()
> should just fprintf to a passed outfile, rather than stderr?

To be honest with you, James, I don't really understand the whole "passed
outfile" approach.   Not that it hurts anything, but what can you achieve
this way that you couldn't also achieve by simply by redirecting stdout to
a file?

At any rate, everything else in scs2ascii just does a printf.  I wasn't
trying to change the design of the software, just make it work again :)

> I suppose the answer to that question lies in the answer to this one:
> what is transparent?  Are transparent codes strictly printer codes that
> scs2ps and scs2pdf should be ignoring?  And if so why shouldn't scs2ascii
> ignore them also?

TRANSPARENT are codes that OS/400 wants you to send to your printer
without translating or interpreting them.

I'm not sure that TRANSPARENT is very useful in the PS or PDF context.
However, scs2ascii is frequently used in conjunction with Host Print
Transform to do things like barcodes, graphics, fonts, etc.   HPT supports
most of the AFP functionality.

When you use Host Print Transform, OS/400 converts the document to the
language of the destination printer.  (In my case, it's PCL for an HP
LaserJet 4)  It wraps all of this printer code in TRANSPARENT orders to
prevent us from mistaking them for SCS codes, and to prevent us from
translating them to ASCII (since they're already ASCII), etc, etc.

So, without transparent working, any document using Host Print Transform
resulted in _no_ data making it to the printer.  (Though, my reports were
happily printing on stderr, which of course was going straight to the
bit-bucket)

My problem was, I was working on a business report on the iSeries,
completely unrelated to the tn5250 project.  I had just done some fairly
complicated printer coding, and was testing it for the first time.
Nothing worked -- every time I sent it, it would just disappear.

I _just_ couldn't figure out what was wrong with my RPG code!  No
matter what I changed, nothing came out!  Finally, after tearing my hair
out, I decided to try it on another printer, and quickly discovered that
the problem was on my PC. :)  I was pretty frustrated.  Though, now -- 12
hours later -- it seems pretty funny!