HP 3000 data becomes more useful if it can be e-mailed as industry standard report documents. After more than two decades of pushing at it, Adobe has made its PDF the de-facto way to exchange documents, even 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 won't be in the Interex Contributed Library (because the programs have gone underground; ask your colleagues if they have a swap tape) but the txt2pdf product works nicely to make this conversion. Even in its most advanced version it's about $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.