RE: PDF Limitations? -- MIDRANGE-L

On Thu, 14 Apr 2005, Scott Klement wrote:

customer that routinely emails pdfs that were created using lp5250d. Here is the relevant part of the configuration:

outputcommand = scs2ascii > /tmp/output.ps ; ps2pdf /tmp/output.ps /home/user/pspdf.pdf
Lets see... scs2ascii will take an SCS document from an output queue and convert it to plain ASCII text (.TXT document). Your customer then takes that and runs it through ps2pdf (?!) as if it's PostScript?!

Oops! I forgot to mention that this particular report starts out as PostScript on the iSeries. I probably could use cat in place of scs2ascii, but this seemed safer.

we have an instance of lp5250d running for each user that wants to email these pdfs. The user simply moves the spooled file to their appropriate out queue and then attaches the file that is created to their email message.
That addresses my concerns -- assuming that it's legal in your environment to have a different output queue for each desintation e-mail address.

For example, I have an e-mail address for a vendor in my VENMST file. When I want to send him a PO, I create a PDF document and send it to his e-mail address.

Using your method, I'd have to a separate output queue for 6000 different vendors! That's a lot of output queues!

We just always write the pdf to the same file in this situation. Each user has his or her own queue so they don't trample on each other. Then the pdf file will always contain the last thing they sent to the output queue. For them, this is the perfect solution.

outputcommand = scs2pdf> /home/samba/<reportname>-`date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S`.pdf
That's actually a good idea... However it assumes that no two reports will be made at the same second -- which isn't a good idea. Particularly since if that happens, there won't be any error message, you'll just simply trash the first one and replace it with the second one.

Very true. Fortunately in this situation two reports won't be made in the same second (though it is technically possible). If this were a generic queue that everyone was using instead of a queue for a once a month report then that would be a problem.

Really? What can you do with the results on a Linux box that you can't do on the iSeries?

1. share the files using a far superior SMB server (that actually works with all clients). 2. file transfer using scp, sftp, etc. 3. automatically burn them to CD/DVD. 4. automatically start a pdf reader enabling me to see the pdf as soon as it is sent. 5. just have it disappear (cat > /dev/null -- this turns out to be quite useful). 6. everything else. Since the outputcommand can quite literally have *any* command in it, I can do anything I want. The entire command set is available to me.

James Rich

It's not the software that's free; it's you.
        - billyskank on Groklaw