[Info-vax] OpenVMS printing to PDF

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-18 12:48:49 +0000, hancockrl59 at gmail.com said:

> We are trying to eliminate printing/scanning in several areas of our company.
> Does anyone know if there is a way to print directly to pdf via an 
> OpenVMS print queue?

OpenVMS barely supports Postscript, much less PDF.   OpenVMS doesn't 
support much in the way of format conversions, even with the larger of 
the various different CDA converter libraries installed.

IIRC, various versions of the CDA tools are (were) part of DECwindows 
and were also available separately 
<http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/cdaconverterlibraryv22.pdf> — CDA did 
not and AFAIK does not have a PDF converter, but can sometimes get the 
source format — which you've unfortunately not specified, though it's 
probably ASCII text — into a format that some other converter can work 
with.

As for your question, install and configure and use execsymb Freeware 
to get a queue for your conversion, and then write some DCL that 
performs the necessary Ghostscript conversions, or that transfers the 
file to a remote host that can more easily perform the conversions.   
If you want to work at it, you might be able to use 
<https://code.google.com/p/pdfium/>, and you'll probably want to have a 
read through of <http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/173>.  As mentioned 
in that latter URL, there are some other open-source and there are 
(were?) commercial options here.


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