Printing with overlays

["Svensson, Joakim" <joakim.svensson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've been trying to find information about overlay or form-printing.
I've got a customer with the following environment:
Hosts: ES/9000 (MVS + CICS), 2 AS/400 and 30+ NT 4.0-servers
Clients: 3270-dsp, 5250-dsp and Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95 and NT 4.0 WS
Printers: Today a mess, but prefferably LAN-attached laserprinters
adressed with LPD.
All nodes connected with a TCP/IP-based WAN

An attractive solution for their printing needs would be to use the same
overlay software/hardware in all environments, thus allowing one or two
persons to specialize in printing and not in the environment, plus a
lower total number of printers.

I know of AFP, but don't think it's a very good solution in the
PC-environment. Correct?

Prefferably the spoolfile would look something like this:

FORM=INVOICE1
HEAD1= data data data
DETAIL1=data data data
FOOT1=data data data

I know there are much more complexity than shown (coverpage/following
pages, several detail formats, variable format, ......)

Anything special to think about? Where the overlays are stored (PC-card,
SIMMs, DASD in some server...)? Time to produce the printed form?
Network traffic???

Regards
Joakim

-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
Joakim Svensson
IT Architect
Cap Gemini, Sweden

----------------
"There are no dumb questions, only dumb answers...."

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