PSM or Infoprint Manager: Question on 1403 control characters to ASCII printers
ITEM: RTA000156315
Q:
Topic thread:
Printer Systems (PRINT - NA/ATS)
Printing Systems Manager (PSM)
My customer used to print from MVS to an 6400 attached to an ethernet
lan through a Network Print Server. The communication system is TCP/IP
and he used the lpr command to print files, his files usually contain
1's as form feeds in the first column of the file. With the lpr
command in MVS he can specify that the first column contains the control
characters (cc=yes).
The customer migrated most of his printing applications to UNIX
environment and is using an AIX machine as a print server running
PSM 1.2.1 and he wants to print to the same 6400 ASCII printer from his
UNIX in which the output files are still being generated with 1's as
form feeds. He defined the printer to PSM using the BSD DSS template and
the printer is treating the first column as data; in other words, the
1's in the first column are being printed.
Is there a way to specify, either in the command used to submit the
print job or in the logical printer that the number 1 in the first
column is considered as a form feed?
The applications run on HP-UX and the logical printer is the remote
queue in the HP/9000.
Thank you in advance for your help.
A:
Since this is an ASCII printer, page ejects or form feeds really
should be encoded as X'0C' in order for a UNIX spooler to process page
ejects correctly. ASCII-based systems (including UNIX systems) don't
have any concept of "records"; rather they use "stream" format where
the end of a line is designated by a New Line character (X'0A'),
and on some platforms (like PCs), in combination with a Carriage Return
(X'0D'). You may know all this, but I wanted to reiterate it for
completeness.
The BSD DSS does not manipulate the data at all, but generally uses
the AIX rembak command to pass the data as-is to the remote server.
It might be possible to write a custom backend program to search the
data and where it finds a X'31' immediately following a LF or CR or
whatever their data uses, to change that X'31' to a X'0C', then send
the job to the HPUX spool. But their data would have to be consistent
in order for something like that to work. I know of no way in either
AIX or PSM to automatically treat 1403 ANSI CCs in an ASCII environment
as equivalent ASCII control characters.
The best approach would be for them to change their applicationto use
form feeds so that it is truly migrated to a UNIX (ASCII) environment.
Thanks for using ViewBlue.
S e a r c h - k e y w o r d s:
psm infoprint 1403 ansi carriage control characters CCs form feed page
eject ebcdic ascii 6400 lpr
WWQA: ITEM: RTA000156315 ITEM: RTA000156315
Dated: 04/1999 Category: PSMAIX
This HTML file was generated 99/06/24~12:43:43
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