Problem solved, Re: Pictures in a report?

Well, as it turns out, Gumbo Spoolmail can graft an AFP overlay onto a simple SCS spool file during the PDF conversion (alphabet soup, anybody?)

Thanks to GIMP, a generic AFP WinDoze driver, and a LOT of VERY PATIENT coaching from List guru Sharon Wintermute, the problem was solved.

The first indication I had that the problem was not as difficult as I'd thought was when put a stripped-down version of the "tutorial" overlay onto the customer box, and tried to email myself a spool file with that overlay attached. Bingie! It worked, and the process was reduced to simply coming up with an overlay.

That's when a whole off-list conversation with Sharon came in. She advised me that she used Gumbo Spoolmail all the time, with overlays generated from M$ Word.

She went on to explain that with an AFP print driver (free download from IBM), all I had to do was select "print to file" with an output format of "overlay," FTP it into a DB file on the box, and do a CRTOVL.

Given that the print driver would, at least in theory, work with any WinDoze application, and that the primary content of the overlay was graphical in nature, I decided to do it in GIMP. (For those not familiar with it, GIMP [GNU Image Manipulation Program] is the open source world's answer to Photoshop, native to Linux, but also available for WinDoze and Macintosh.) So I put the customer's logo onto a page, printed it to an overlay, uploaded it, converted it, and transferred it to the customer box.

Except for having to make sure the receiver file was LVLCHK(*NO) (you'd think that if CRTOVL doesn't give a rodent's defecatory orifice about format level, it would be coded to ignore it!), it worked the first time, and while I've still got a bit of tweaking left, it's looking quite good indeed.

Thanks, Sharon. I owe you one.


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James H. H. Lampert