Turn spoolfiles into PDF documents
April 17, 2006
HP 3000 data becomes more useful if it can be e-mailed as industry standard report documents. After more than a decade of pushing at it, Adobe has made its PDF format pretty much the de-facto way to exchange docuements, even the complex ones.
Which might have prompted this question from HP consultant and Suprtool trainer Jeff Kubler:
Does anyone have a lead on a tool that converts spoolfiles to PDF files? Are there any Contributed Library tools?
It's not exactly free from the Interex Contributed Library (and what ever happened to those programs, anyway, since the Interex bankruptcy?) but the txt2pdf toolset works nicely to make this conversion. Even in its most advanced version it's under $1,000, at last glance. Bob McGregor reports as much.
Jeff, txt2pdf does this. We have a job that runs that:
1. Checks a pseudo device we have setup for any spoolfiles that are on the device with an PRI >0
2. If it finds a spoolfile, we convert it to PDF and move it to a server
3 Sends an e-mail to the streamedby variable telling them the PDF doc is ready on the server.
4. Alters the priority to 0 to mark it processed
We've been using it for a couple years, and it works great — of course, once we got the bugs worked out. What's cool is if someone delete the file, we just adjust the priority to something greater than 0 and it gets reprocessed.
We also have an emailpdf command file that will convert the spoofile to a PDF doc and e-mail it as an attachment.
If you e-mail Bob, we bet he'd share those command files of his with any 3000 customer who wants to ship out PDF reports instead of work with spoolfiles.