RE: AFP/IPDS laser printers

You're making it harder than it has to be.

You can associate an overlay with your SCS streams. You don't need AFP or IPDS or PDF to do that. Works quite well with any laser printer you can name in Host Print Transform.

The easy way to create an overlay is to set it up in Word or Excel or Power Point or whatever you like, then "print" it to the AFP Printer Driver that comes as an optional install with Navigator. Set the printer driver to output a file as an overlay. Use Nav to copy the file to an overlay object or copy it to a source physical file and use the CRTOVL command. Keep in mind that the overlay origin and the print origin aren't necessarily the same; experiment a bit until you get the overlay and the SCS print lined up.

There are options on the printer driver. You can capture the character data as graphics, if you like, or as character data with font info. Graphics makes for a large overlay file. Character data with font info works fine as long as you have a similar font installed on the IBMi. 300 dots per inch works well, but you can try other resolutions. Including logos in full color can take a little work. Don't be afraid of large graphic overlay files, printers are fast enough these days you'll never notice.

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-
bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mike Cunningham
Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2013 7:29 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: AFP/IPDS laser printers

Can anyone recommend a good IP laser printer that supports AFP/IPDS
printing? We want to create overlays with our spooled output and then send
to a printer. Looking to eliminate a proprietary Xerox printer language we use
to create overlays now and get back to something more universal. We
current create overlays to use with emailing some documents (POs) but
when we print POs we use preprinted forms. We are on V7.1. We have not
done this but think we could use the built in PDF output and associate it with
an AFP output queue and then FTP a PDF to any printer that supports
receiving an FTP of a PDF. But just having an AFP/IPDS compatible printer
sounds a lot easier. Color is not needed but could be useful. 70-80 page per
minute range on the printer.

Or we look into how to load an overlay to an HP printer and then how to
trigger the use of that overlay from a non-AFP spool file.


Mike Cunningham
VP of Information Technology Services/CIO
Pennsylvania College of Technology


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