Creating PDF files from Pick

[Prashant Sahgal]

Hi!

We have two A/P boxes running on AIX. We would like to publish our reports on our Intranet by creating PDF
files from our spooler jobs. Has anyone done this?

Alternatively, if anyone knows where I can get info on the file format, please let me know. Maybe I can do the
coding in Pick Basic. So far, I have only been successful in dumping TXT files to our FTP directory. A PDF file
would be more GUI-oriented.

Thanks!

Prashant Sahgal
psa...@hoffman.ds.adp.com

[Ronney Black]

What I've been doing is printing reports to a spool file, then exporting
the spooled item to a pick file and then sending that file to our
intranet server. It's clutzy but it works. If you hear of - or come up
with a better way I'd like to know about it. Likewise, if I find a
smoother solution I'll post it.

Ronney Black
DP Manager
City of East Cleveland

[Tony Gravagno]

On Sun, 16 Feb 1997 17:40:23 -0500, Ronney Black <rbl...@gwis.com>
wrote:

Prashant Sahgal wrote:
>> We have two A/P boxes running on AIX. We would like to publish our reports on our Intranet by creating PDF
>> files from our spooler jobs. Has anyone done this?
>>
>> Alternatively, if anyone knows where I can get info on the file format, please let me know. Maybe I can do the
>> coding in Pick Basic. So far, I have only been successful in dumping TXT files to our FTP directory. A PDF file
>> would be more GUI-oriented.

Ronney Black wrote:
>What I've been doing is printing reports to a spool file, then exporting
>the spooled item to a pick file and then sending that file to our
>intranet server. It's clutzy but it works. If you hear of - or come up
>with a better way I'd like to know about it. Likewise, if I find a
>smoother solution I'll post it.

It seems like all of my postings require an upgrade from AP to D3, but
that's because the tools are there. You can try one of the following
two solutions using D3:

The first:
1) Use NFS to mount a PC directory to a Unix directory. Example:
mount mypc:/PDF_dir /net/PC/mypc/PDF_dir
2) If you want a printer report to go out, note that in D3 the spooler
hold files now go to a "normal" file, rather than frames in overflow.
So whenever you print something to a hold entry, copy that hold entry
to the new mounted file system. For example:
copy spooler,peqs, 17 to: (unix:/net/PC/PDF_dir
3) When the data gets on the PC doing the PDF conversion, a few things
need to happen: Adobe Distiller converts .PRN (printer output) files
to PDFs, so you may need to run the output through a program that does
a print to a file. Then you need to run it through the distiller.

The second alternative is the same, except that rather than doing the
copy mentioned in step #2, you can setup an alternate spooler file,
which is actually the mounted file system. This means changing the
q-pointer pointing to the "spooler,peqs" file to something different,
like "spooler,remote.peqs". The data level of remote.peqs will then
be changed from a super-q-pointer pointing to "peqs:" to
"unix:/net/PC/mypc/PDF_dir". This is easier to do than it sounds, but
at the same time there are a few little hooks. I'll reserve the hooks
for another thread, but they involve getting the peqs "hdr:" to look
at the right peqs file. If you don't want to mess with this sort of
thing, use the first option.

Lastly, FYI, an Adobe Acrobat reader is available for AIX, HP/UX,
Linux and a few others. (I haven't had any luck with the Linux port
yet, might be the version of the distiller we are using.)

I hope this helps.

--
Tony Gravagno, Pick Systems, Inc.
Quality Assurance Manager
FTP/Technical Pages (only) Administrator
http://www.picksys.com/technical/techmain.htm

For Customer Support, please contact
sup...@picksys.com or phone 714-261-1875
PLEASE provide full contact and System information
in all inquiries, including System ID.

[LouieInSeattle]

Has anything happened with PDF files since 1997?

I'm looking for a way to create PDF files from D3 Pick, hopefully coded in Pick.
I've gotten an HTML version to sort of work, but it displays differently on different systems. For instance, in Outlook, it isn't showing the table columns nor the alternating colored rows.
On an iPad, the HTML email shows the table columns correctly separated by a normal vertical line, but no alternating-colored rows.

Quite frustrating.

[lalalemon]

What about something like this?

http://www.zumasys.com/products/zumasys-document-server-zds/

[Ross Ferris]

You could check out or Visage.Reporter product. This gives you a D3 aware drag & drop designer environment for forms &reports, which can then be faxed, emailed, saved as a file (including PDF) or even printed on a "real printer" if required ;-)

If you wanted to move your apps to GUI/Web, then a similar drag'n'drop interface is available for designing screens

See www.stamina.com.au or drop me an email for more details

[Jay]

Why not just create a print filter that runs your output through a PDF converter at the Linux leve?. We use htmldoc and just code the entire job with <pre> and </pre> tags in its simplest form but you could use table tags and div tags to get what you want. Although admittedly I'm not quite understanding what you're doing in total or what platform(s) you're on.

[Tony G]

Louie, PDF is easy and amazing these days.

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[Frank Petillo]

On Monday, January 5, 2015 at 5:36:09 PM UTC-5, lalalemon wrote:
> What about something like this?
>
> http://www.zumasys.com/products/zumasys-document-server-zds/

It is now ADS from Acuityware.com. Check it out. Great product and easy to integrate into any software!