Re: outputting postscript to a printer

[Rich Duzenbury <rduz-midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2005-03-09 at 11:35 -0700, James Rich wrote:
> 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?
> 
> James Rich
> 
> It's not the software that's free; it's you.
>       - billyskank on Groklaw

I've had good luck writing postscript to SCS print files.  

I set up a remote output queue using work station customization object
QWPDEFAULT from library QSYS.  QWPDEFAULT generally just translates
ebcdic to ascii and adds carriage returns and form feeds.  

Form feeds and postscript aren't necessarily meant to get along, but I
haven't had any issues.  I suppose if they worry you, you can write all
of your lines to the print file as spacea(0), but I like being able to
DSPSPLF and see the data I'm sending.

The other alternative is to make the print file a *USERASCII print file.
In that case, you then have to convert the data from EBCDIC to ASCII
yourself before you write it.  I've had good luck with the iconv api for
such a purpose.  The drawback is that DSPSPLF throws an error when you
attempt to display the spooled data.


--
Regards,
Rich

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