Lars Appel, the former HP support engineer who built such things on his own time while at HP support in German, has source code and a compiled copy of the utility.

Such solutions, and many more, are hosted on the Web server at 3K Associates, www.3k.com. Check the Applications Ported to MPE/iX section of the Public Domain Software area at 3K's Web site.

You'll also find a link to GhostPCL up at the site, another Appel creation, one which he describes as

A program that reads PCL input files and converts them to a variety of output formats, including PDF or JPEG, for example. Combined with my little FakeLP Java program, you might even use it to capture MPE/iX network spooler output and generate PDF or JPEG from an MPE/iX spoolfile.

Open source solutions like these have been an HP 3000 community tradition. Way back in 2000, we reported in the NewsWire about that FakeLP Java program, helpful in getting text2pdf to do its PDF magic. (For the record, both Mark Bixby and Appel are still working in the 3000 community, but not for HP; Bixby joins QSS this month, and Appel has been helping in support for the producer of the database Eloquence, Marxmeier Software)

A roadblock to using the text2pdf program: the spoolfiles had to be in text file format to work with it. But Lars Appel offered a free solution to make 3000 spoolfiles that don't rely on CCTLs ready for their PDF closeups:

"I have a small Java program that listens to a given port, for example 9100, and 'pretends to be a network printer' i.e. gets all the data sent and writes it to a flat file. This might be a start, as OUTSPTJ.PUB.SYS should have converted CCTL to plain PCL when sending to a JetDirect printer. However, this little Java program is just a quick and dirty experiment. Use at your own risk; it worked on my 3000, but your mileage may vary."

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// FakeLP pretends network printer to capture spooler PCL output

import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;

class FakeLP {

public static void main( String args[] ) throws Exception {

int port = 9100;
int next = 1;

if (args.length > 0) port = Integer.parseInt(args[0]);
if (args.length > 1) next = Integer.parseInt(args[1]);

ServerSocket serv = new ServerSocket( port );

while (true) {

System.out.println("FakeLP listener ready");

Socket sock = serv.accept();
byte[] buf = new byte[4096];
String name = "F" + (next++);

System.out.println("Capturing spoolfile to " + name);

InputStream si = sock.getInputStream();
OutputStream fo = new FileOutputStream(name);

for (;;)
{
int got = si.read(buf);

if (got != -1)
fo.write(buf, 0, got);
else
break;
}

fo.close();
si.close();
}
}
}