Re: Print Char w/ No EBCDIC Hex Code

[Scott Klement <klemscot@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 30 Jan 2003, Michael Naughton wrote:

> One of my users has asked me if there is a way to embed a special symbol
> in a text string -- in other words, he wants to have a text string (in a
> normal AS/400 PF record) that contains something like "#  25 x 45 #", only
> each "#" would show up as a solid bar or some other image that doesn't
> have an EBCDIC hex code.

Hmmm...  on my system, there's an EBCDIC code for the solid bar...

> Of course, he'd also like it show on the screen
> that way :-), but that is not so important. Most likely, we'd be printing
> on some sort of laser printer connected to the AS/400 over our network.

Assuming that you're using host print transform with this laser printer,
it'd be pretty easy to make this work.    All you'd have to do is define
a workstation customization object where you tell OS/400 that your
'special token' character is an ASCII control sequence, and then insert
the hex codes for the ASCII characters you want to output as the sequence
itself.

I explained something similar (in that case, an EBCDIC @ symbol was being
translated to an ASCII x'02') a while back.   Here's a link to the
archives:
  http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l/200101/msg01185.html

>
> Also, I think we'd always be able to scan the string for substitution
> characters (if that were the way to make this work) and replace them with
> the graphic when we were printing.

That would be another way to do it.. if you have a program that's running
when they're printing, you could do the translation manually in a
program...   Tho, the nice thing about setting it up as a control sequence
is that you can tell it the actual ASCII hex codes (instead of having your
RPG program translate it to an EBCDIC code, and then have that EBCDIC code
get translated to the appropriate ASCII code)

>
> I suspect the short answer is, "no", but before closing the book on this I
> thought I'd ask around and see if anyone has any ideas. . . .
>

Heh... there's always a way.