[Info-vax] OpenVMS printing to PDF

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-20 02:38:06 +0000, Dirk Munk said:

> I've done some Postscript programming myself a very long time ago, and 
> I still remember some of the basics. Among the things we did was 
> produce Postscript files in a Cobol program, and the resulting file was 
> sent to a Postscript chain-form printer. You couldn't make the pages 
> too complex, because then the printer couldn't process the Postscript 
> fast enough to have the resulting image ready for the next page, and as 
> a result it would insert a blank page.
> 
> I get your point with regard to the PDF input fields. So after the form 
> has been filled, it should be "flattened", removing all fields, but not 
> their contents of course. However you could also use password 
> protection or another way of protection to avoid some one changing the 
> contents later on.
> 
> I have a program called Nuance Power PDF Advanced on my PC to create 
> and edit PDF files and forms, so I have a rough idea about all the 
> possibilities with PDF.

I'd suggest using technologies designed and developed the last ~twenty 
years (e.g. HTML, PDF frameworks), but if you wanted to spend the time 
with Postscript or LaTeX or such tools, or if you wanted to do in-line 
coding akin to what was typical with FMS, it'd work.   iOS and OS X can 
trivially generate this stuff, or yes, you can use older tools and then 
ps2pdf or similar.

For Python, I'd likely look to start with something akin to 
<https://bitbucket.org/rptlab/reportlab> 
<http://www.reportlab.com/opensource/>.  Maybe 
<http://appyframework.org/podWritingTemplates.html>.  But various of 
the systems I deal with are easier here, and in various dimensions — 
tools, SMTP support, etc — so I'd probably not bother trying to get 
something like OpenVMS to drive this whole process, and would RPC or 
push notify or otherwise trigger and transfer either an individual 
request or a bulk run from the OpenVMS server to the host performing 
the processing, or would use a database shared with OpenVMS, etc.  In 
general and obviously depending on the application, some other platform 
may well be preferable to using OpenVMS here.

For OpenVMS, CDA$ conversions would be the typical mechanism for 
something-to-something conversions (maybe text or Postscript to PDF, 
here), but there's little support for "recent" formats in CDA$ (older 
RTF is about the limit) and AFAIK there's no PDF support in CDA or in 
DECwindows.  (Though there was a PDF tool mentioned in an early VSI 
roadmap, that seems to have disappeared from the more recent roadmap.  
I've not seen any mention of extensive work in DECwindows, nor a PDF 
framework, nor PDF tools other than what was in the roadmap a while 
back.  That's probably in the plans for "sometime around eventually", 
but getting the VSI business going first is more important.)



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