Re: How to print an IFS PDF file on a LAN printer

Hi Lucia

We have GhostScript installed, I don't remember whether it is installed in PASE, since I am not looking at the system. We installed several years ago. We used it to convert PDFs to a PCL file in the IFS, which we copied to a *USERASCII PRTF in some fashion - didn't know about Scott's tool for printing from the IFS. This was done because a vendor product did not support the AFPRSC keyword in PRTFs. CPYSPLF to *PDF does support that keyword, so this was all we could do - worked very well, except that performance suffered because what used to be done on a separate server that the vendor product used, a lot of that processing was now done in our job on the i. Performance did not suffer because of using GhostScript alone, there were several other steps involved that used to be done on another box - you probably don't have that situation to be concerned about.

I don't remeber that it was difficult to install GhostScript, it was using something with repositories in the early days of open source support on the system - and since it is all open source, support and troubleshooting means we go to the web and other resources, not IBM. Maybe now that it can be installed with yum, there is more support from IBM. And IBM do have a support process available for all kinds of products and open source applications, for a fee, of course.

On 8/10/2021 10:31 AM, Maria Lucia Stoppa wrote:

Hi Patrick,

Yes, installing Ghostscript (in PASE) would be a great solution as it
doesn't imply to have printers updated with a specific card to obtain
direct print feature: the *USERASCII stream to the printer will be already
formatted in PCL.

The point is the only experience I have with PASE is 7z program
installation to zip/unzip files which I did following a link by Scott
Klement (as far as I remember).

What makes me feel uncomfortable with this solution is that I haven't found
any clear instruction page yet alongside with the fact that I know very
little about PASE, so I am asking myself what to do in case of trouble,
since Ghostscript installation seems to be a bit more complicated than 7z.

Anyway, I will think about it.

Thanks

Il giorno mar 10 ago 2021 alle ore 17:10 Patrik Schindler <poc@xxxxxxxxxx>
ha scritto:

Hello Maria,

Am 10.08.2021 um 14:54 schrieb Maria Lucia Stoppa <mlstoppa@xxxxxxxxx>:

Given the holidays time we are in I am waiting for the maintainance

service to call on us to help configure the Ricoh, hopefully, because I
don't know what's needed to have this feature and how to install it.

I'm not well-seasoned with modern printers, but usually the firmware can
deduct itself what's inside a print job and act on that accordingly.

As mentioned by Roberto and John, Ghostscript (in PASE) could be a
solution. Usually, it's installed with some helper scripts providing a
pdf2ps command, amongst others. Almost all modern printers understand
PostScript, so it comes down to convert a PDF via GhostScript to
PostScript, and upload that via FTP to the printer. Maybe the *USERASCII
method hinted by Vern can be used to not needlessly fiddle with FTP.

You can even optimize that stuff by using UNIX style pipes and netcat in
QSH:

cat pdffile |pdf2ps - - |nc printer-ip 9100

No tempfiles, thus no unnecessary disk I/O avoided. :-)

:wq! PoC

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