Re: Convert *USRASCII spool file to PDF

Umm... format is the *USERASCII data? As far as i5/OS is concerned, "User Ascii" only means that the data is unknown to the system, and that it should send it to the printer as-is. The underlying data could be in ANY format... Only the application that wrote it there (and, hopefully, the printer it's sent to) will know what that format is.

So, unless your business rules state that the *USERASCII file will "always be postscript" or "always be TIFF" or "always be PDF" or "always be PCL" or whatever, then I don't see how you can write a program to do this, otherwise your program would have to grok every possible file format...

Vaidhyanathan, Prakash wrote:

Hello,
I'm trying to convert a *USRASCII spool file to PDF. I used the spool
file APIs (QSPGESTP, QSPOPNSP, QSPCLOSP) to write the spool data into a
PF. I don't want to create a new spool because of security restrictions
in my work. The problem I now have is how to append control characters
of the spool file into the PF (basically I want to mimic CPYSPLF with
CTLCHAR(*PRTCTL) so that I can feed this PF to a utility that creates a
PDF. Is there a way the spool APIs give me the control characters too?
Thanks in advance,
Prakash