IBM Mainframe and AS400 IPDS filters for CUPS 1/2

Marco Willemse anonymous at easysw.com
Fri May 7 14:33:01 PDT 2004


Request for comments...

Wouldn't it be nice if Mainframe originated prints could use CUPS to get to non AFP Printers ?

In the IBM Mainframe world, beside text only prints, most documents that are printed are IBM AFP print files that get sent to IPDS capable printers to be printed.

I thought that I could easily find a quick and cheap solution to integrate IBM AFP printouts in an environment with 300+ HPlj PCL printers. But the more I searched, the more I became aware that this solution will not be quick nor cheap !

Let me explain how I understand the matter:
- An application running on a Mainframe or an AS400 produces a spool file in a format called AFPDS.
- The printing system gets this data and combines it with PageDefinitions and FormDefinition and some other PSF resources and produces then a print stream to be transmitted (earlier using SNA nowadays using TCP/IP). The only parameters to address a specific IPDS printer are IPAddress and Port Number. If this is an AFP/IPDS printer, there are absolutely no problems but...
- To print to any of the 300+ HPlj PCL printers there are only three solutions
1) use a Mainframe product that transforms the AFPDS spool file using the PSF resources (printdef,formdef) to another print stream format and uses lpr to send it to a Printer Server to be queued for printing
2) Have a Mainframe or distributed software that emulates more than 300 IPDS printers (therefore it need to listen to more than 300 TCP/IP ports) and transforms the IPDS into a print file to be sent again via TCP/IP to the Printer Server
3) Have the Mainframe print directly to the PCL printers by putting a hardware interface that does the IPDS to PCL transform.
All of the solutions are very (very !) expensive if you need to handle more than 100 IP connected PCL printers.






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