Re: Best document formatting language -- MIDRANGE-L

I have to develop a new application in RPG. Output of this application
will have text and grapics, and will be send to printer, IFS, email and
fax. Using Infoprint 5722IP1 licensed program will probably not be an
option.
For email we are using Giovanni Perotti's MMAIL, and our faxsolution is
Hylafax, located on a linuxbox.

Generating PostScript works very nicely, the downside to it is that youhave to generate PostScript. :)

What I mean by that is that the iSeries doesn't support PostScript, so youwon't be able to create a nice graphical document with DDS via CODEDesigner (or whatever) and then write it out as PostScript. That won'twork (at least not easily... there are APIs that convert AFPDS toPostScript, but they're slow and don't work very well, IMHO)

Obviously, it requires more work to write PostScript directly. The nicething is, PostScript is a text format, so you could potentially usesomething like CGIDEV2 to create "externally defined" PostScript files.Indeed, it's relatively easy to design your document in Word orOpenOffice, print the result as a PostScript document (using a PostScriptprinter driver, if necesary) and then insert variables into the resultingfile.

Once you have the document in PostScript, you'll want ot translate it intoother formats for other output devices:

a) There's open source software called Ghostscript that will convert fromPostScript a million other formats, including PDF and PCL. It doesn'trun natively on the iSeries, but Ghostscript will run under PASE.Alternately, you could run it on your Linux box, and do the conversionsthere.

For very large documents, this might not be practical. If you need toprint large documents, I suggest getting a printer that supportsPostScript -- they're easy to find, and relatively cheap.


In my experience, the Postscript to PDF translation is nearly perfect.

b) Hylafax understands PostScript natively, so you should have no problemwith that.


c) Outputting AFPDS from PostScript is something I've never done, and I
don't know how possible this is.

What will be the best document formatting language to create the first
(main) output of an application that can be converted to other formats
_on the iSeries itselves_ ? APFDS, Postscript, PCL, HTML or other?

The other thing you might consider is XML. It's becoming more and more ofa standard for this sort of thing. Your program writes out XML data, andthat data can then be transformed into any other format.

For example, the socket and IFS tutorials on my web site were written inDocbook (which is an XML language). I can transform the docbook intoHTML, PDF, RTF, TeX, PostScript, and many other formats by running itthrough the appropriate formatting program.

At this point in time,I find PostScript to be a better choice. I find iteasier to make it work. However, I think XML is probably the way thingswill go in the future. It's something to think about.