Several questions on managing the pcl transform of PSF/6000
ITEM: RTA000089351
Q:
ABSTRACT: PSF/6000: Several questions on managing the pcl transform
in a production print environment.
SEARCH ARG: PSF/6000 pcl
TOPIC THREAD: PRINT
AFP
PSF6000
..
Customer is using the pcl transform of PSF/6000 to print large pcl files
to a 3900 duplex machine. I have seen these pcl print jobs in excess
of 13500 pages. Below are several print administration questions we
have for setting up our production print environment.
1) Historically PCL files have been smaller files primarily because high
speed PCL printers have not been available. As mentioned above this
customer is planning on sending very large pcl jobs to the PSF/6000
server. Is there a limit to the size (number of pages, amount of
disk storage, etc.) pcl file that the transform can process?
2) In PSF/2 there is a print and retain capability. We have not seen an
indication that PSF/6000 provides the same capability. Since this
customer will be sending these large pcl files over their ethernet
backbone we are interested in knowing if there is a way to retain
print files at the PSF/6000 server after they have been printed?
If so, can they be retained in PCL format? Can they be retained in
AFP format if the transform is invoked through the queue device?
3) We have noticed that an entry is placed in the log file for each page
that is converted. This means there are 13500 entries in the log
file for the print job referenced earlier. After printing
a dozen of so print files we went back to the log file to investigate
a problem and found that only the last few files were still available
in this log. What determines the maximum size of the log file? Is
there a parameter we can set for controlling the size of the logfile?
4) Following the print operation the customer separates the
print job into 150 page (300 image) bundles to be manually bound with
a tape binding. Is there a way to tell PSF/6000 to offset every 300
images within a job? This would simplify the separation process.
5) The customer wants to archive the pcl print files but has not been
able to find an acceptable pcl viewer. They are also evaluating the
AFP viewer. The problem with using the AFP viewer is that all the
AFP pages are images and therefore the only index information is the
page number. Is it possible for the customer to imbed AFP index
records in the pcl datastream and have them recognized and passed
uncorrupted through the pcl transform? If it is possible to imbed
5A records in the pcl the customer may also use this approach to
create the offsets discussed in question 4.
Thanks for your assistance.
A:
1) There is no hard coded limit in PSF/6000. AIX V3 is limited
to a maximum file size of 2GB, but PSF for AIX Version 2 (now announced)
has some segmenting capability to work around this size limitation for
locally-submitted jobs. But in PSF/6000 V1.2, the limitation I see
is workspace (fixed disk). You may also need to adjust the maximum
amount of time the transform will spend processing the job (done in
the transform configuration file or on the pcl2afp command with the
-j flag).
2) There are a couple of possibilities. One would be to set up an AIX
queue with a custom backend that would convert the PCL to AFPDS
(preferably compressed since PCL does compress well -- disk space
savingsĒ) This custom backend could make a copy of the file to disk
before submitting the AFPDS to print. Then you could either manually
delete retained files that are no longer needed, or you could run a
periodic cron job to do clean up. PSF for AIX Version 2 does provide
some additional job retention possibilities for locally-submitted jobs,
but not yet for jobs coming across using lpr/lpd (with the exception of
NFS-mounted files).
3) What you're seeing in the log was inadvertently left in for debugging
purposes. The developer will create a fix and put that in a PTF. You
can open a PMR on this one. As far as controlling the log file, that
has not been externalized so you cannot control that.
4) Nothing exists within PSF/6000 that we are aware of, although the
developer had a couple of ideas, such as splitting up the transform file
(using the included afpsplit program) into 150 page chunks that appear
as separate jobs to PSF, thus separated by header/trailer pages.
5) Per the developer, there is nothing that can be done to the PCL
without modifying the transform/interpreter to support it. If you
wish to pursue, you should contact John Hardy in Services to see if
and when and how much. He added, "Given that they are willing to modify
the PCL, how about postprocessing the AFP out of the transform and
just adding their index info at that point? Since the AFP is all image,
it would be easy to parse it and add whatever indexing info they
wanted."
I hope that helps.
S e a r c h - k e y w o r d s:
AIX PSF/6000 PCL INDEX RETAIN LOG OFFSET psf/aix transform pcl2afp
WWQA: ITEM: RTA000089351 ITEM: RTA000089351
Dated: 03/1999 Category: XPSF6000
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