Some time ago, I wrote the blog, “Export Spooled Files to PDF Files,” that described the support available in the 6.1 and 7.1 releases to generate PDF files, either natively or by converting spooled files to PDFs. Near the end of that blog article I wrote, “I wonder if IBM will provide an easier interface to do this someday? It seems like it would be really nice to simply copy a spooled file to a PDF … ”
IBM has recently released a PTF that enhances the Copy Spooled File (CPYSPLF) command to support copying a spooled file to the integrated file system. With this PTF, CPYSPLF now has additional parameters to specify the location the file is to be stored in the IFS; it also now supports the capability to specify a workstation customizing object (WSCST), which provides support for converting the spooled file to a different format, and in particular, the capability to convert a spooled file to a PDF file. Like the graphical interface written about previously, the Transform Services (5770-TS1) licensed program product must be installed.
Note the new WSCST parameter supports all Host Print Transform customizing objects. For example, QWPGIF, QWPTIFFPB, and QWPTIFFG4 (in the QSYS library) will convert your spooled file to a GIF or TIFF image, using two different compression methods for TIFF. These WSCST values don’t require the Transform Services product.
PTF SI43471 describes the new parameters and has the associated help text. This support document describes the support in more detail.
I’d like to thank Bob Baron from the IBM i print team for his assistance in writing this blog post.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.