[Info-vax] OpenVMS printing to PDF

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-18 21:50:18 +0000, Jan-Erik Soderholm said:

> Stephen Hoffman skrev den 2015-05-18 23:19:
>> On 2015-05-18 20:31:44 +0000, Jan-Erik Soderholm said:
>> 
>>> Stephen Hoffman skrev den 2015-05-18 15:39:
>>>> 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.
>>> 
>>> VMS certenly supports PDF creation, with the right tools installed.
>> 
>> By that definition, OpenVMS also supports the SpaceX Falcon 9 option 
>> for orbital processing, too.
> 
> Do you have a link to the tool for VMS for that?
> If you do, then yes it fits the definition.
> If you don't, you have to explain a little more.

By your "if we add {whatever} then OpenVMS can do {whatever}.   If we 
strap on a Falcon 9 <http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities, then the 
OpenVMS server can go even further and faster.

> 
>> 
>>> VMS doesn't support any 3G programming language either, without the 
>>> right tools (compilers) installed...
>> 
>> Which is one of (many!) problems with OpenVMS, of course.
> 
> And how many "other systems" comes with anything more then a C compiler?

Python, Ruby, Perl, php, tcl, all of what bash / ksh / tcsh / zsh 
provide, probably a few others I've missed.
Add in the (free) developer tools, and you get C, C++ and some other bits.
Integrated support for Postscript and PDF and some of the Office 
formats and for RTF, too.

This is the market that OpenVMS is increasingly now in, too.

>> Other systems do have native support for reading and writing of PDF 
>> formats, and without having add-on tools.
> 
> One can also say that the add-on tools are in the base distro.

Or one can strap on a Falcon 9 and launch the server.

>> Basically, your view of OpenVMS and mine are very different.
> 
> Agree! I'm very practical oriented. I rather do something for the users 
> then whine about, well, almost everything.

You can't do anywhere near enough, unfortunately.  None of us can.  
That's part of why the projects and the complexity and the rest is 
increasing, and why we're working with more and more tools and 
techniques.  More and more is integrated, and the add-ons are 
ever-larger and more capable and sometimes more complex.   It's also 
why isolated AlphaServer DS20 boxes are scarce, too.   Those 
AlphaServer DS20 boxes getting harder to work on, in comparative terms. 
 Sure, OpenVMS is as it ever was.  That's not good enough.

> If my users says "we want to create PDF files", I say "fine, there are 
> tools for that, no problem. I'll fix your PDFs!".

Good on you.   That's unfortunately not something that's particularly 
common, nor particularly affordable.  You're still in the market that 
OpenVMS was, back in the 1990s or so.  Fun times.   But times have 
changed, and other vendors now have equivalent or variously better 
products, often cheaper, and using and selling and supporting selling 
OpenVMS against those gets... difficult.  Can I load in PDF and 
Postscript and Apache and the rest?  Sure.   Done that.  But then 
compared with what else is available now, why should I?

Again: OpenVMS support for Postscript and PDF is poor.


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