Re: [open-cobol-list] Addressing printer in report writer program.

[Michael Anderson]

I'm somewhat of a newbie to Cobol, writing COBOL since the 1980's, and also I never used the Cobol report writer.

After looking at the simple example by Rildo Pragana, I may actually start using it.

I think Brian Tiffin has an example in the Cobol FAQ of Cobol calling CUPS directly, which would be better than opening /dev/lp0 directly.

For anyone who likes Tcl, Using the posted example, the cobol report is in a file 'printer.text', so I would use pdf4tcl, and do the following:

cat printing.text|./lp2pdf -p a4 -Fp 11 -Lp 50 -o printing

Which converts printing.text to a pdf, using 'a4' paper size, font point size of 11, with 50 lines per page, storing it in printing.pdf

Oh and lp2pdf is COBOL with some supporting C, and Tcl. There is much more that can be done with pdf4tcl.
I have example files (lp2pdf source code) with a free format version of Rildo's test27 source here:

http://www.j3ksolutions.net/reportwriter/

Requires tcl 8.5 or higher, and the "pdf4tcl" package.
http://pdf4tcl.berlios.de/

Cheers,
Mike.

On 03/08/2014 12:17 AM, Kevin Monceaux wrote:

On Fri, Mar 07, 2014 at 04:09:59PM -0500, john Culleton wrote:

Or do I just send it to a Line-sequential file and print it off-line?

The ACAS (Applewood Computers Accounting System) package might be a good
place to look for examples of printing line-sequential files.  It has two
copybooks, one for portrait and one for landscape:

*>
*>  Portrait
*>
 01  Print-Report.
     03  filler          pic x(117)     value
     "lpr -r -o 'orientation-requested=3 page-left=48 page-top=24 " &
     "page-right=24 sides=two-sided-long-edge cpi=12 lpi=8' -P ".
     03  PSN             pic x(48)      value "HPLJ4TCP ".  *> This is the CUPS print spool, change it for yours
     03  filler          pic x(15)      value "prt-1".      *> Don't change this line

*>
*> Landscape
*>
 01  Print-Report.
     03  filler          pic x(117)     value
     "lpr -r -o 'orientation-requested=4 page-left=18 page-top=48 " &
     "page-right=10 sides=two-sided-long-edge cpi=12 lpi=8' -P ".
     03  PSN             pic x(48)      value "HPLJ4TCP ".  *> This is the CUPS print spool, change it for yours
     03  filler          pic x(15)      value "prt-1".      *> Don't change this line

Various programs write output to file prt-1 then print the output with:

    call     "SYSTEM" using Print-Report.