AS400 Finishing Functions

Using RPM Remote Print Manager you can apply the many Windows printer finishing functions to new and legacy reports! Various finishing functions as Duplexing, Stapling, Sorting, Water Marks, Orientation, and tray selection can greatly improve the quality and presentation time of your reports. RPM allows your AS/400 print jobs to come out the way YOU want them to!

AS400 finishing functions

The RPM Remote Print Manager “Text Queue” can apply any and all the finishing functions that the print driver supports to the report.

Text printing allows RPM to adapt text to any Windows printer using the print driver. The ability to handle many text formats intelligently, while providing a simple interface, has been a key reason for administrators and other IT professionals to make the switch from their existing print server to RPM.

Flexible Finishing Functions for AS400 Spool Files

Select the printer and the setup
Margins, both soft margins set by the user and printer margins
Control the font
Wrap or truncate lines
Show bold & overstrike
Suppress banner pages
Suppress blank pages

Printer

RPM lets you print to any Windows printer available to the PC; text printing goes one step farther by using the printer settings you select.

For instance, open a queue and select the printer, then the orientation (Landscape vs. Portrait) and the paper size (e.g. Letter vs. A4). Save these settings and RPM will use them whenever a print job is submitted to this queue.

Margins

RPM provides the tools to set page margins, using metric and US units, points and picas. RPM also retrieves the actual printer margins and adjusts as needed.

For instance, certain HP printers have a 0.667 inch margin. Given the default text margin of 0.5 inches, RPM automatically adjusts the printed margins, font scaling, line placement and wrapping as needed.

Blank Pages

By default, RPM will not print any page that contains only white space (non-printing characters). This has proved to be a significant cost savings to many of our users.

Banner Page

The LPD specification states that a banner page prints by default and that the print client must suppress it. However, this is not practical in many situations, so RPM supports an option to suppress the banner, whether requested by the print client or not.

Lines

RPM can wrap or truncate lines, using either the margins or the line length.

Bold & Overstrike

RPM recognizes the backspace character (Ctrl+H or 0×08) as a command to overprint. RPM also recognizes line segments, which end in line feed or form feed, using carriage return as a command to return to the left margin. This format is used by many legacy systems such as mainframes and AS/400s.

Fonts

RPM allows the user to select any font supported by the designated printer. However, if the user specifies a non-ASCII code page then RPM will limit the choice of fonts, if that code page uses a special character set.

RPM also gives you fine control over the font size. You can:

Select the font and size using the Windows font dialog
Specify the lines per inch or the lines per page (within the top and bottom margins)
Specify the characters per inch or line length (between the left and right margins)

This makes it very easy to print if you know the number of lines or columns. Just tell RPM how many lines and/or columns to use, and let it do the rest!

Both RPM and ExcelliPrint are available for you to try free of charge, for 21 days. If you run into problems or have questions, please contact our tech support at (208) 523-6970. Download RPM Remote Print Manager or download ExcelliPrint IPDS software.