Re: outputting postscript to a printer

[Scott Klement <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I have an RPG program that creates postscript.  I need to send it unchanged 
> to a printer.  I can't use a print file because that will then send an SCS 
> print job and that won't work.  Any ideas on how to do this?

When you create a print file, it has a device type parameter.  For example 
CRTPRTF FILE(MYPRTF) DEVTYPE(*SCS).

You're correct that if you specify DEVTYPE(*SCS) the system will send an 
SCS print job to the printer. But if you specify DEVTYPE(*USERASCII) the 
data will be sent to the printer without any changes.

The way I like to do it is generate the PostScript file as a stream file 
in the IFS. The IFS APIs will automagically do the ASCII to EBCDIC 
translatation for me. Then, if I want to debug things, I can easily 
NFS/SMB mount my IFS and open the stream file with my favorite text 
editor, or even use ghostview to see what it looks like.

When I'm ready to print it, I re-open the stream file in my RPG program, 
this time in binary mode (so no translation takes place) and read 
fixed-length chunks of data (the length matches that of my print file) and 
write the results to the *USERASCII print file.

On the final record that I write to the print file, the data size will be 
smaller than the record size (most of the time).  I wasn't exactly sure 
what to do with this -- I ended up padding the data with ASCII blanks at 
the end and that seems to work okay. I think the blanks are considered 
whitespace in PostScript and are therefore ignored.

Make sense?