[Info-vax] OpenVMS printing to PDF

[JF Mezei]

On 15-05-20 19:13, Stephen Hoffman wrote:

> Which is what I *was* discussing, particularly some options and 
> alternatives that somebody — Mr Munk — might want to consider when 
> designing that PDF tool that he was referencing.


My take is a bit different. Original question was "can I redirect a
print queue to generate PDFs so I don't have to change anything in my
apps ?"  (aka: change a flag somewhere and built-in support for pDF
create activated on queue).

The answer was NO.

But a few of us provided ways to accomplish this on current VMS. (EXEC
symbiont and ghoscript seemed to be the common theme).  It looks like it
wasn't the magic bullet the person wanted since it isn't as simple as
turning on some flag in a queue definition. But it is currently the
simplest way to achieve what he wants. But it requires coding the
command procedure invoked by the symbiont which calls ghorstcript to do
the conversion to PDF and store it.

Yeah, it would be simpler to invoke ghostscript at the same level as the
app instead opf app submitting to a print queue. But that would require
changes to the app routines/command procedures.


> Now beyond the discussion of options and alternatives that would be 
> useful for somebody creating a tool, would I like to see a web 
> rendering engine in OpenVMS?  Yes.  A much broader selection of format 
> and file conversion tools?  Yes. 

Back to the CDA converters: The architecture was very interesting
because you could "type" a file and the text would be extracted and
displayed on a character cell terminal, or you could edit it in
decwindows and get the full attributes. (and there was the CDA viewer
(IIRC) app in decwindows as well.

This was a precursor to what OS-X has on its gui which allows the Finder
to do previews of the content of various file formats (quicklook).

A similar framework for VMS would be interesting. Perhaps CDA could be
use as a core architecture perhaps not.