RE: Print RTF or XML from RPG

[Rich Duzenbury <rduz-midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2004-06-18 at 00:21, Scott Klement wrote:
> Hi Rich,
> 
> > The magic is that WSCST QSYS/QWPDEFAULT will translate EBCDIC to ASCII,
> > but not introduce any special control characters into the print stream.
> 
> That's a good idea.  In fact, I even used that technique on a differnt
> project where I was outputting DMX language for a thermal printer.
> But there are some problems that I had with it, so I decided not to use it
> for my PostScript project.  I'll list the problems, so people can decide
> for themselves whether they're important:
> 
> 1) Host Print Transform with QWPDEFAULT will insert formfeed characters,
> x'0C', at the end of every page.  That's not what you're supposed to do
> with PostScript -- though maybe it won't hurt anything?

I hadn't noticed.  So far, no ill effects.  Sometimes I do an exception
output where the space after is set to 0, but I'm sure I've also done it
with space-after set to 1.  Maybe I'm just lucky so far...

> 
> 2) That method uses Host Print Transform, and therefore takes a bit longer
> to move the spooled file from the spool into the printer.  Whether or not
> that matters depends on whether or not performance is a hot issue in your
> project.
Hmm.  Longer than what?  Transform(*NO), but you convert the data to
ASCII?  One small problem, you can't read any of the report data while
it's in the output queue.  Most folks can't read PS anyway, I suppose. 
>From a debugging standpoint, I sure like being able to simply view the
PS code with WRKSPLF.

Most of the time, I'm building jobs that are mainly printing text, and
perhaps some lines and boxes, and generally using large fonts, or
barcodes or some such.  These seem to do quite well AFAICT.

> 
> Plus, i'm a control freak, so i like to make sure the ebcdic -> ascii
> translation is done my way :)
It depends on what I'm doing.   So far, transform with QWPDEFAULT seems
to work pretty well.  I don't mind pointing out that there are likely
mismatches between the ASCII translation used by QWPDEFAULT and that
used by the PostScript engine with some of the 'special' characters, but
I haven't run into any. A-Z, a-z, 0-9, plus the small subset of
punctuation characters that I see in local use all translate just dandy.

Perhaps the thing to do is build a custom *WSCST...


--
Regards,
Rich

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