The reason for my writing is the confluence of a number of events, all in the
last week or so. One is a number of you have written and thanked me for the
calendars -- and said how impressed you were that they were done on an HP3000
(actually, we've been doing this for nearly ten years now, but your comments
are much appreciated anyway). The second is Shawn Gordon's review of OpenPDF
in the newest issue of the 3000Newswire. The third was Rene Woc's asking me
again about the status of QueryCalc's PDF generation capabilities, Rene being
prompted by reading Shawn's review, saying that QueryCalc's PDF was "still
the best-kept secret on the HP3000."

So, let me not keep any of this a secret any longer.

Actually, QueryCalc can't generate PDF; it can only write PostScript files to
either a printer or a disc file on the HP3000, as a standard fixed-ASCII flat
file, and we've been doing that since about 1991, when we decided to abandon
PCL.

While we still print to any PCL printer, we no longer support any text
enhancements (bold, italics, etc.) or graphics (lines, boxes, etc.) in PCL;
we just consider a PCL printer to be of the same level of intelligence as
that of a cheap dot-matrix printer or a large chain line printer (what one of
our customers calls a "dumb-ASCII" printer, emphasizing the first two
syllables of that phrase).

Rather, it's PostScript where we've put all of our effort for the last nine
years in generating truly good looking output on the HP3000 for reports and
graphics. And now that PostScript is standard on essentially every HP
laserjet printer that would be used in a commercial environment, that
decision seems even wiser than it did when we initially made it.

But, as I say, QueryCalc can't generate PDF natively. When the internet began
to rise about five years ago and Adobe Systems had released their first
versions of PDF (portable document format), I actually began a fairly large
project to have QueryCalc internally generate PDF as a third printing
language (ascii, postscript, and pdf). Eventually, the project was abandoned
because, in part, the enormous size of the task (PDF is a surprisingly
complex format to generate if you're going to fully support it), and in part,
because there was little or no demand for it at the time.

Over the last several years, people have occasionally asked me about PDF
support, but no one seemed more than just curious. Surprisingly, though, in
just the past two weeks, I've had several seemingly serious inquiries about
it.

To convert PostScript to PDF requires the use of an Adobe Acrobat
"Distiller." Because the product was, up until just very recently, available
on Macs, Windows and Unix machines (including HP-UX), I'd focussed my efforts
on seeing about getting the HP-UX Distiller ported to the HP3000. Because of
the recent inquiries, I began re-investigating the possibility of getting
that done. I was initially extremely disappointed to find out that Adobe had
dropped HP-UX support of the Distiller for the most recent version of the
product.

But, sometimes a disappointment is a blessing. This morning I decided to try
a completely different tack -- simply because it was obvious that we now have
all of the pieces on the HP3000 to attempt a completely different approach.
This second approach was to download the QueryCalc-generated PostScript file
from the HP3000 into an intranet connected-PC, using FTP, run the Distiller
from inside the FTP commands, and backload the now-distilled PDF file onto
the HP3000. The whole process was easier to put together than I imagined. It
came together in just a few hours.

The machinery I used was a 918 and a cheap, $400, 300HMz e-machine PC,
connected together by a 10Mbs TCP/IP-based LAN. Both machines use private
address space IP addresses (192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.102, respectively).
While the 918 is reachable from the outside world, the PC isn't, thus it's
quite safe to operate as an anonymous-FTP server.

The process requires two pieces of PC software. A PC can't be used as an FTP
server as it comes from Microsoft. Nonetheless, it only took me about 30
minutes of searching to find what -- after half a day of use -- seems to be a
quite excellent PC-based FTP server. The server is $40 shareware and can be
downloaded from:

     http://ftpserv-u.deerfield.com

The other piece of software required is the Adobe Acrobat Distiller (in this
case, for Windows), priced at $250. It can be purchased from:

     http://www.adobe.com/store/products/acrobat.html

although it can only be delivered by mail and not dowloaded.

This afternoon, I put together a web page in just a few minutes (as you'll be
able to tell) that have two PDF examples. The original PostScript was
generated wholly on the HP3000, using only a terminal interface and
QueryCalc. Indeed, both examples were generated years ago.

The first example is a two-sided, four color brochure that we call ADAGERAD.
Rene Woc asked us several times to put something together that they could put
in their update tape mailings (I've always been grateful for the generosity
and enthusiasm of Rene and Alfredo). I did as they requested in 1994 or 1995.
The file you'll see was put together in about a half-day back then. Because
it has no queries into IMAGE databases, this QueryCalc "report" executes and
prints in less than a half-second to a flat file on the HP3000.

The second file was put together by one of our customers, Rob Perkins, the
comptroller of Mizzou Credit Union, in 1992. It is an NCUA (National Credit
Union Association) call report. Every credit union has to regularly file
these reports, although the report doesn't look like this any more. Rob was
the first person to use the then-new PostScript capabilities of QueryCalc;
when I first gave him 15 minutes of training over the phone, Rob then gave me
a lecture for the subsequent 30 minutes about non-artistic he was. An hour
later he faxed me back a truly good looking report, a report we still give
out as an example of what can be done.

The NCUA report used to run in less than a minute on his busy 947. Virtually
every number that you will see on the report is the result of a query
question into their IMAGE databases, with the exception of a few obvious
column or row sums (QueryCalc is constructed as a spreadsheet, but one where
every cell can be a query into your databases). If you find that the numbers
in Rob's report don't add up, that's only because I scrambled most of the
important results.

After this morning's experimentations, it is now clear that a few lines of
code can be tacked onto the back of an QueryCalc job to FTP the resulting
flat PostScript file to the PC, distill it there, and then reload it back
onto the HP3000, to be either displayed as either (i) a hyper-linked file if
the HP3000 is acting as a web server, or (ii) FTP'ed to another web server,
located somewhere else, or (iii) e-mailed to a client. The distillation
process, when run as an HP3000 job, required less than 30 seconds round-trip
from the HP3000 to the PC and back for the both files (actually, 20 seconds
is a closer measure).

The web page where I put these examples up are at:

     http://aics-research.com/pdf.html

You will, of course, need an Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the files. When the
Reader is run on a larger-resolution (1024 x 768 or larger) PC -- especially
under Windows 98 Second Edition, where they have font smoothing straightened
out -- the images are simply quite excellent.

Wirt Atmar