Tim writes:

> Thanks to Rob and Wirt for your responses to my question. Unfortunately I'm
>  not any further. What I want to do is capture spoolfiles and $stdlists from
>  the HP and move them to an intranet, and then put them in PDF format so we
>  keep page breaks (or if HTML can keep page breaks, etc, that would be fine
>  as well).
>
>  I don't have the budget to buy 3rd party solutions.

Outside of the 30-second, absolutely-free, convert-ASCII-to-HTML method I
showed you, you're basically out of luck if no money can be spent.

I would estimate that to do what you want to do will cost you $5000, at a
minimum, broken down into these segments: $1000 for a cheap, dedicated PC
running Windows 98, $400 for Adobe Acrobat, $200 for a terminal emulator that
can perform file transfers, with the remainder going to salary for the person
who will write (i) the code to convert your spoolfiles to PostScript and (ii)
the macros/agents/scripts to download the converted files into the PC for
distillation into PDF -- and (iii) then move them onto your intranet server.

What you want to do is not a particularly trivial task (although it could be
made significantly more so if just a few more pieces were in place. An HP-UX
version of Adobe Acrobat is available. If it were capable of being run on an
HP3000 under POSIX -- but it's not -- then distillation could be done on the
HP3000. Given that capability, and using either the available-now Apache
webserver or the one coming from Netscape, the HP3000 could be programmed to
(i) automatically convert your files to PostScript, (ii) distill them to PDF,
and (iii) then act as either an auxiliary or primary server for your intranet.
Doing this, your files would never have to leave your HP3000).

Discounting dreams, clearly some savings in the first architecture can be
accrued if you use your server as the site of PDF distillation. Nonetheless,
under any design, some cost will be involved.

Wirt Atmar