Re: SPLF2TIFF (SPL2TIFF) Question

Hi Walt,

> The promise of this tool is that it can convert any spooled file to a
> TIFF file, even *USERASCII type spool files. According to IBM, these
> are the APIs needed to extract the contents of the spool file.

I'm a bit confused by this. How could it possibly convert a *USERASCII file to something else? *USERASCII isn't a particular file format. All it means is "i5/OS doesn't understand the data. It will simply copy it as-is to the printer."

Basically, you use this when printing to an i5 printer from a Windows machine. The Windows driver creates teh spooled file with all of the printer control characters already embedded into it, and you save it to the i5/OS spool as *USERASCII. The system does nothing but keep it in the spool until it's ready to be printed, then copy it to the printer. It can't interpret the data because it knows nothing about the format. Is it PCL? Is it PostScript? Is it PDF? PPDS? Some other format? Maybe one that's proprietary to a particular printer? It could be anything...

That being the case, I don't see how you could possibly convert a *USERASCII to something else.. it doesn't know what format it's in, so it can't possibly understand the codes that are embedded into that format.

If you happen to always put your *USERASCII in a particular format, and want to write code that simply assumes that the *USERASCII data will always be in that format, then you could do so using the APIs you mentioned, but I very highly doubt that MC Press has already done so!

The users who said that it "works great" are probably using it with either SCS or AFPDS spooled files, where the format of the data is already known.

I don't understand what your message has to do with RPG programming. Do you have a question about some of the code in this utility?