The company I work for would like to stop using these big ol' Genicom 4440 printers and create PDFs instead. The cost for maintenance and paper has gotten too high. Ideally whenever someone prints in Unix it will produce a (plain text) file in a folder on a windows server. I believe this is called a print image file.
We have other software that will process it and output the PDF.
I am not an experience user. I'm not afraid to try and do things myself, which I have, but when you get down to it I just don't know what I'm doing . I've logged in as root, gone into sco admin, and messed around trying to set up a printer, but it never works.
Any time I search the web, I can find step by step instructions on setting up a printer in windows to be remote printer for Unix, but only a vague description on how to set things up on the Unix side.
Can this be done, and if so what are my first steps in getting this accomplished?
Any thoughts or advice is much appreciated. Thank you.
Oh and we are running SCO OpenServer release 5 if that helps.
I originally posted this under the SCO section but I think it belongs here under Unix for dummies.
Do you have an sftp/ftp server installed on a windows box somewhere?
If so, just sftp/ftp the file you want to print over to the windows server. Then play with the file over there. If that is more convenient.
On the SCO box, if you have perl, there are modules that create pdf files from flat text files. You simply add the perl library files to /usr/lib/perl5/.... (wherever you have your perl libraries) and run the code on each file. (this also works on Windows)
Common misconception these days that PDF and HTML are the only viable text formats... Add a carriage-return and .txt still works great. Better than PDF for many purposes since they're trivial to edit and you can append to them with no fuss.
There are some instances were FTP works. Thats what I do. It works great for me. However, the work I do produces a data file and I get to chose what to do with it. I'm one of a dozen users. The work the other users are doing results in reports printing off. Custom reports like year to date financial information on clients for example. I have no idea where that data is coming from. There isn't anybody in our company that knows COBOL anymore. Our programmer that wrote all this custom stuff has probably passed away. We can't get a hold of him. I do see /usr/lib/perl5/ but I don't know if that would be a solution I could implement. I don't how to edit the code that is executed when something gets sent to a printer.
---------- Post updated at 11:39 AM ---------- Previous update was at 11:34 AM ----------
I don't want unix to create PDFs. I want a plain text file to appear in a folder instead of being printed. From there I'm going to use software to map data from the text file out into fields and store it in a SQL database and do some archiving. The format I spit the report back out in doesn't have to be PDF but plain txt presents problems. I don't want anyone who looks at a report to be able to edit anything. If a report says we are to pay a client a certain amount of money, I don't want someone changing that.
---------- Post updated at 01:14 PM ---------- Previous update was at 11:39 AM ----------
My original thoughts were that I could set up a generic printer on a windows machine that printed to a file, then share that printer and install it on unix. Make it my default printer and remove the Genicoms. Not that easy though huh?
A file solution would be the most straightforward, especially if you want a PDF. Instead of n levels of printers, just make a file. Then the problem becomes the simpler one of getting the files where you want.
Looking into Perl's PDF::Create module...
Last edited by Corona688; 09-18-2012 at 04:31 PM..
The simplest solution is to create a "dumb" printer that saves the print file to a directory on the SCO system. This can be made flexible enough to allow different directories for different users/applications etc.
Implement either Samba, or Visionfs, depending upon which release of SCO that you have, and share the folder that contains the print files. The print files will then be available on a shared drive to the Windows software.
Depending upon how the cobol print files are created, there can be issues creating a PDF file from them.
If you have the source code for your cobol programs, I can provide support for those.
To create the printer:
Save the following script as /usr/spool/lp/model/file with owner bin, group lp perms 0550
Add a local printer
Select "file" as the model name
Select "/dev/null" as the device.
Create the directory /u/spool, or modify to suit.
This will give everyone read/write access to the directory, but only root will be able to remove the directory.
I have files named with different prefixes. From each I want to extract the first line containing a specific string, and then print that line along with the prefix.
I've tried to do this with a while loop, but instead of printing the prefix I print the first line of the file twice.
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Hi,
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huge_file.txt
a
a
ab
b
##################################
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Need shell script to read two file at same time and print output in single file
Example I have two files 1) file1.txt 2) file2.txt
File1.txt contains
Aaa
Bbb
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Fff
File2.txt contains
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hello
have a file1
H87I
Y788O
T347U
J23U
and
file2 J23U U887Y I99U T556U
file3 I99O J99T F557J
file4 N99I T666U R55Y
file5 H87I T347U
file6 H77U R556Y E44T
file7 Y788O K98U H8I
May be using script we can use file1 to search for all the files
and have the output
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