[Info-vax] OpenVMS printing to PDF

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Stephen Hoffman skrev den 2015-05-19 00:43:
> On 2015-05-18 22:05:16 +0000, Dirk Munk said:
>
>> Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>> On 2015-05-18 20:51:52 +0000, Dirk Munk said:
>>>
>>>> The functionality that I mean is the ASCII > Postscript conversion,
>>>> that could be easily adapted for a ASCII > PDF conversion. That part
>>>> of DCPS shouldn't have to output to a printer, it could also produce
>>>> files.
>>>
>>> You are seriously are proposing running file-format conversion
>>> processing through a symbiont?   Not via a callable API such as CDA$ and
>>> not via a DCL command such as CONVERT /DOCUMENT?
>>>
>>
>> Good question.
>>
>> Using a symbiont would be possible. That is standard way to produce pdf
>> files in Windows. I have several pdf printer applications on my PC. In
>> any application that has a "print" command, I can choose a pdf printer,
>> enter a file name, and I will get a pdf file.
>
> It's the standard way because Windows never really had support for
> Postscript or PDF, and never looked at integrating the document handling.
>
> Rather than using the printer for this processing, imagine if your tools
> all had export or save commands or output options, and that wrote the
> format directly?

Current office packages (both from MS and the free ones) has builtin
PDF creation.

For those applications that doesn't, I have installed the (free)
CutePDF printer driver.

http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp

Works more or less like a print symbiont.

>> mentioned this before. Suppose you would create a form for a bill with a
>> word processor, or with a pdf editor, that form would have fields, and
>> you would have a utility comparable to FMS to fill those fields from an
>> application, that would be the kind of pdf utility I would like to see.
>

For more automated form handling and printout, we used JetForm ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetForm
http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-45682

We had "JetForm Merge" on a MV3100/90.