Craig Vespe wrote:
> George Fetters writes -
> >
> >     There are also two products for the HP3000 that can load forms (or
> >     signatures) into LaserJets.  LaserSoft and Fontasia.  I think the same
> >     company owns them both now.
> >
>    Let me make a little clarification here (as well as a little plug).
>    Lasersoft was a Unison product prior to Unison's acquisition of Tymlabs.
>    Tymlabs at the time had a competing product, Formation, and a decision
>    was made to concentrate our efforts solely on one product - Formation.
>    All Lasersoft customers were offered free upgrades, complete with all
>    forms conversions.

Let me make a customer plug here.  If you are using canned (no source
code) applications, or just don't want to bother with special
programming, Formation is excellent for this task.  Their windows-based
form designer allows you to specify the number of columns and lines for
a page, draws a grid (not unlike the old print layout forms of the 60s),
and you "draw" a form around the grid, with option to pull in TIFF
format graphics.  You are a bit limited in the fonts you can use for
pre-printed text (it tries to use imbedded printer fonts) and you are
similarly limited in the data font, but overall it's a no-brainer to
replace pre-printed forms.  You can take an existing program which does
output to pre-printed forms, design your form in windows, upload the
result, and it compiles an environment file tailored to the destination
printer model.  You then just add ;ENV=myform.group.acct to the JCL.
It's also the only one I know of that handles 2680 environments (and
can convert them to LaserJet use if you have the raw PCELL and other
original fonts/forms).

Fantasia is much more flexible in formatting your data and using fancy
fonts, but it requires your program to emit formatting commands to do
so.  Fantasia is *very* similar to TDP (I think it was based on TDP)
so you must write out the formatting commands in your program.  It may
be able to do fixed forms (no-brainers) but I think even they require
some application modification to work correctly.  If you have access to
the application source code and can modify it, you can get some really
professional quality output, but it takes work.

Formation allows some similar "tweaks" of your output, but to get to
that level you must use their intrinsics which are based on the old
2680 PSP code.  It is much more complicated than Fantasia.

I'm not familiar with the other product mentioned - LaserSoft.

Jeff