Re: outputting postscript to a printer -- MIDRANGE-L

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I have an RPG program that creates postscript. I need to send it unchanged to a printer. I can't use a print file because that will then send an SCS print job and that won't work. Any ideas on how to do this?

When you create a print file, it has a device type parameter. For example CRTPRTF FILE(MYPRTF) DEVTYPE(*SCS).

You're correct that if you specify DEVTYPE(*SCS) the system will send an SCS print job to the printer. But if you specify DEVTYPE(*USERASCII) the data will be sent to the printer without any changes.

The way I like to do it is generate the PostScript file as a stream file in the IFS. The IFS APIs will automagically do the ASCII to EBCDIC translatation for me. Then, if I want to debug things, I can easily NFS/SMB mount my IFS and open the stream file with my favorite text editor, or even use ghostview to see what it looks like.

When I'm ready to print it, I re-open the stream file in my RPG program, this time in binary mode (so no translation takes place) and read fixed-length chunks of data (the length matches that of my print file) and write the results to the *USERASCII print file.

On the final record that I write to the print file, the data size will be smaller than the record size (most of the time). I wasn't exactly sure what to do with this -- I ended up padding the data with ASCII blanks at the end and that seems to work okay. I think the blanks are considered whitespace in PostScript and are therefore ignored.

Make sense?

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