PSF/VM with PSF/AIX or Infoprint to IP60
ITEM: RTA000153770
Q:
Topic thread:
Printer Systems (PRINT - NA/ATS)
PSF/AIX
PRINT XPSF6000
Customer has asked if the following printing system set-up will work.
Customer wishes to run PSF/VM, attached to this will be PSF/AIX on
a RS6000 system, these will be connected via Ethernet. The customer
will be printing to an IP60. There will be terminals connected to the
RS/6000 that will wish to print. The customer wishes to send PCL,
Postscript and IPDS data to the printer. Customer has read some
documentation and thinks that this should work, after a brief
discussion with PSC though it seems the VM and AIX systems will
only talk to each other in Direct Mode.
A:
The InfoPrint 60 originally supported IPDS only and did not have native
PCL or PostScript support. However, in 1999 a PCL option was announced
for the Infoprint 60 (3160-002), so you may wish to consider this option
if the customer will be printing a lot of PCL.
PSF/AIX does include both the pcl2afp and ps2afp transforms, and
also supports PSF Direct (as does InfoPrint Manager), so the customer
may also achieve their objectives without the IP60 PCL option through
use of the transforms.
Note that PSF/AIX, though withdrawn from marketing 11 Dec 1998, will
continue to be supported until 31 Jan 2001. If the customer already
has PSF/AIX, that's okay. But if this is a new purchase, then the
product you should recommend is Infoprint Manager. Let me note a
few comparisons:
1) The ps2afp transform in InfoPrint Manager is a true Adobe rip,
and will transform PS L3 output at InfoPrint Manager 3.1. The
ps2afp transform in PSF/AIX is a Xionics rip; it supports
PS L1 and PS L2. The Adobe rip in InfoPrint Manager is faster
than the Xionics rip in PSF/AIX. This may or may not be an issue
depending on the complexity, size and level of PostScript the
customer wants to print.
2) The pcl2afp transform in PSF/AIX and InfoPrint is the same, at
least at this point in time.
If the customer has PSF/VM and does want to have the operator's control
of jobs remain at the host, then they can use PSF Direct (SNA LU6.2)
with either PSF/AIX or InfoPrint Manager. Timers can be set to allow
the printer to be shared automatically between the PSF Direct session
and the LAN jobs.
If the customer is sending down line data, then it is possible to use
LPR to send print jobs down to PSF/AIX or InfoPrint Manager, but it is
*not* possible to pass parameters (such as pagedef or formdef name)
down to PSF/AIX or InfoPrint Manager. Jobs would be spooled at and
operator control would pass to the RS/6000.
It would be helpful if we understood more about the type of data that
they want to print from VM and where they want operator control to
reside.
I'm going to close this for now, but please reopen if you get more info
on the type of data from VM and would like additional information.
Note that there are some restrictions in PSF/AIX regarding mixed data
(line data with imbedded AFP structured fields) when it comes to
inline resources, so if they're considering that, we need to discuss
further.
Hope this helps.
S e a r c h - k e y w o r d s:
psf/6000 psf/aix psf aix psf/vm vm 3160 infoprint 60 ip60 direct lpr
sna tcp/ip pcl postscript pcl2afp ps2afp ipds print share sharing
timer
WWQA: ITEM: RTA000153770 ITEM: RTA000153770
Dated: 11/1999 Category: XPSF6000
This HTML file was generated 2000/11/30~13:34:10
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