[Info-vax] OpenVMS printing to PDF

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-18 17:35:13 +0000, Dirk Munk said:

> Postscript and PDF are closely related. Do i guess the most natural 
> thing would be to add PDF file generation to the DCPS product suite.

That would not make the capability particularly useful to OpenVMS 
applications, short of queue-level hackery.

> Now there are simple PDF files that can be produced by any word 
> processor these days, but there are also 'special' PDF files with for 
> instance security features added. I can imagine that a software product 
> that can produce these more enhanced PDF files could be of use to 
> certain customers, and be a nice addition to the software portfolio.

It'd be more typical to implement Postscript and PDF conversions into 
CDA, which would then allow end-user applications to perform document 
conversions for input and for output, and it could also be used with 
DCPS, potentially with DCPS sniffing the input and converting the 
arriving data as needed.

(Though it'd be nice to have a way to tag the arriving data format for 
the stream or for the file, short of running something akin to file 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_(command)> on the data stream and 
"guessing" at the format.  Note too that file was reimplemented for 
better security <http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=142989267412968&w=2> 
recently, too.  Sniffing arbitrary files securely is harder than it 
looks.  But I digress.)


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