[Info-vax] Direct print of PDF files on PDF compatible printers.

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2022-03-02 15:40:29 +0000, chris said:

> I just assume that vms would have the sort of common sense utilities 
> that most of the mainstream world has taken for granted for decades 
> now, but perhaps i'm wrong.

OpenVMS printing was getting stale around Y2K, and little has changed 
in the ensuing decades.  IPP/IPPS support is lacking, same for Bonjour 
to find printers, and otherwise.

Per one industry source: "98% of all printers sold today support 
IPP/2.0 and DNS-SD."

Much the same for common utilities, file shares, and other tools for 
printing and otherwise.  netcat might be useful for hack-printing here 
for instance, but that's not readily available for OpenVMS.

A whole lot of OpenVMS-generated data does get routed through other 
platforms for further processing, such as via an LPR/LPD or telnet 
server queue, or via EXECSMB, or via a file share or 
remotely-accessible directory hosted on OpenVMS, or otherwise.

There are ports of PDF readers, of Ghostscript, of binutils and other 
such tools, but they're not shipped as part of the operating system and 
are thus not available on many OpenVMS boxes.

(As for assumptions of "most of the mainstream world" and tooling 
around OpenVMS, ~twenty years on, and we're still adding zip and unzip 
to our OpenVMS installs.)

Most of this is certainly possible to add to OpenVMS locally.

If you're interested in adding some dependencies to your own OpenVMS 
server printing support, I'd start looking here: 
https://istopwg.github.io/ippsample/index.html

DNS-SD info is available at: http://www.zeroconf.org and there's a 
semi-recent tutorial video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gbY9ScZJlQ




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