IBM Mainframe and AS400 IPDS filters for CUPS

Marco Willemse anonymous at easysw.com
Sun May 9 01:00:23 PDT 2004


Helge Blischke wrote:
[...]
> The idea of "hacking" a CUPS filter (afpstops or the like) sounds
> promising on the first glance, but there is one thing that complicates
> the scenary:
> AFPDS is not only a print stream data format but in essence a protocol
> used by the mainframe spooler and the printer to talk with one
> another - think of forms, overly images, fonts and the like which
> can be stored on the printers (at least some printers by IBM and
> OCE, as far as I know), and think of switching between operating modes
> (like line mode, enhanced line mode, and full APA mode). As far as
> I have understood the IPP RFCs and the CUPS book, these features
> seem not (or at least not yet) to be covered by IPP.
[...]
I was thinking to have the filter to understand IPDS rather than AFPDS. In this case the merging of forms, overlay, pages would be done on the mainframe by the PSF product.

Of course fonts can be a problem.

Commercial Windows based afp/ipds2ps transform utilities usually support a maximum of 128 or 200 printers (by mapping IP port to a printer name) and the price is about the same of installing the hardware DIMM converter on the printer itself. Add to this the software support fee, hardware and os licences and it becomes even more expensive.

The idea of having only one external converter is good. The problem is really *how* to pass those extra informations (like printer name just to mention the most important !!!) so that it can be processed in the right way by CUPS. When using IPDS the mainframe thinks to talk to a printer, so it does not need to pass those informations.




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