RE: printed reports with font changes and logos, signatures, etc

Yes - agreed. But with the other OS's this stuff is all part of the development studio. No extra charge. And it works seamlessly.

Requiring an i-series add-on product from a different vendor than the OS to do something as commonplace as printing a report with various font sizes doesn't seem right. And mgmt has a tough time swallowing that.



-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John Yeung
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2012 12:06 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: printed reports with font changes and logos, signatures, etc

On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 12:49 PM, Stone, Joel <Joel.Stone@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Compare this to every other OS in 2012 where the developer clicks on a
field from a list of fields, drops it on the page, and clicks on the size
attribute to see a wysiwig of how the page will look.

It makes me understand why mgmt here and everywhere wants to run
from the i - it is extremely labor intensive to set up dozens of report
fields battleship style (specifying each horiz and vertical coordinate)
on a report compared to every other OS. Show this to a c# or java
developer and they will laugh and think it is a joke.

If your management is amenable to spending some money (four figures,
or into the low five figures) for "fancy" printing, there are
commercial solutions out there which make it much easier. Obviously
you won't get WYSIWYG layout capability on the green screen, but there
are packages that have easy-to-use layout software that runs on
Windows while the data merging and printing happens on the i.

While they're at it, they usually throw in e-mail capability, output
queue or stream file monitoring, options for different file output
like PDF, etc. The options that I've personally looked at (because we
needed to replace JetForm) are DocPath, ACOM, and inFORM. I'm
confident these are not the only ones out there, either.

John