Re: sending a printer control character from RPG

[Douglas Handy <dhandy1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Brad,

>USually you can just move the hex value into a field and place it on the
>output specs, compile the printer file to not convert special characters,
>and it works like a charm. 

The obvious problem here is the "special characters" may not be the
same in both the EBCDIC and ASCII code pages.  So by the time the
printer sees the character, even with RPLUNPRT(*NO), it does not
necessarily have the desired affect.

The simple solution is to add the ASCII transparency prefix, which
will pass through the character(s) unchanged to the printer.  This
works especially well with PCL type printers, where the only
"unprintable" character is the leading Escape.  Just define a constant
ESCAPE of x'03011B', then output it plus the "human readable"
remainder of the escape sequence.   But watch out for variant
characters like [ if you have international considerations.

Doug
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