Sending a hold file to the printer

I think I am missing something basic with the spooler.  For a long time our company was using D3 and the way our software was setup, whenever something was to be printed, it would first generate a hold file and then the user could send the hold file to the printer at their leisure.

When we switched to QM I just had things go immediately to the printer because for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to send a hold file to the printer after the fact.  I know this is something very basic but I just don't see it.  The solution must be in some mental blind spot of mine.

Can someone help me with this?

I think I am missing something basic with the spooler.  For a long time our company was using D3 and the way our software was setup, whenever something was to be printed, it would first generate a hold file and then the user could send the hold file to the printer at their leisure.

When we switched to QM I just had things go immediately to the printer because for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to send a hold file to the printer after the fact.  I know this is something very basic but I just don't see it.  The solution must be in some mental blind spot of mine.

Can someone help me with this?

Use SP.VIEW and selelct the S action when the item is displayed.

Martin

I was right!  I totally missed that command in the manual.  Thank you!

However, it's giving me the same result that the SPOOL command gave me when I tried to use it send a hold file to the printer. To give you an idea of the problem, I ran an English report (Query) that gave me a hold file but also printed.  The report was 6-1/2 pages long.  I used the SP.VIEW command on the hold file that was originally generated and when I used the "S" option to print it, it ended up being 12-1/2 pages long.  It added a blank page after each full page of the report.  The SPOOL command did the same thing which is why I thought the SPOOL command must not be the way to go.  As it turns out, it looks like the SP.VIEW logic is the same.  Whatever it's doing, it adds a blank line after each page.  Now, I can't say that it will do this in all circumstances but the fact that it does it at all is a problem.  It appears to be a paging issue.  Is there a way to compensate for the problem?

That could be an issue with your print unit definition.

If your print unit has defined a page that is shorter than your output page, then the form feed could occur at the top of the page, thereby giving you the blank page.

You could also play with the NEWLINE mode and FORM.FEED mode (see SETPTR) - but I have no idea whether they would make any difference.

Cheers,

Brian

Well, there are multiple ways of doing this. First, a disclaimer - we don't do any of these ... we output everything as an Excel spreadsheet, and then use Excel to output stuff to a printer.

The "Official" way is to use the SPOOL command. This command should look something like:  SPOOL $HOLD item-name LPTR n  (where n is the print unit number). Alternatively, you could use the SP.VIEW command which displays the output ... and you can then choose to send it to the printer (print unit).

If your output in $HOLD is in PCL format, then you might want to expose the $HOLD folder as a mapped drive (or shared folder), then use a PCL Viewer to open the document, and print to a printer.

Even if the output is in plain text format, you might still want to expose the $HOLD folder as above, and open the item in Notepad or Notepad++ and print from there.

I hope that helps.

Brian

This may be a case of double formatting.

When QM creates the output document it apples formatting by inserting a page break at the right places. When you then spool the hold file formatting is applied again giving the blank pages that you are seeing.

The solution is that either the program output or the spool command must use the NFMT option in the SETPTR command.

Martin

Martin, I couldn't act on your proposed solution until now.  This actually makes sense.  I was thinking that there was something like that going on but didn't know how to compensate for it.  There are some concepts about the spooler that I've never quite grasped but what I did was issue the SETPTR command with the added ",NFMT" on the end just before I used the SPOOL command (I'm assuming that SPOOL and the output from SP.VIEW are essentially the same). 

It didn't like it.  Oh, the SETPTR command with NFMT executed without any apparent problem.  But, when I went to use the SPOOL command right after that it dumped the process state and gave me an error of "000002DA: Unable to create print file 0, '/usr/qmsys/prt/p7' [3018] in $SPOOL"

Am I missing something?