John,

There is SANFACE Software, http://www.sanface.com/ but I'm pretty sure
its limited to Text to PDF, not PCL to PDF.

Then there is openpcl, written in Java, but I haven't tried it. Looks
complicated! http://openpcl.sourceforge.net/

What I've done on NON MPE platforms is modify the report program to use
Tcl, see TCLEVEL & TCLINIT, with a tcl package called pdf4tcl.
Using COBOL I'll call TCLINIT, and TCLEVAL, or TCLEVALFILE; works great
to create PDF's directly from COBOL, NOT on MPE, unless someone has
ported Tcl to MPE.

Lars? If perl & java were ported, then Tcl should be a piece a cake,
right? ;-)

Basically the COBOL program (Cobol-IT / OpenCOBOL) writes out this file
http://www.j3ksolutions.com/pdf/pdfsource.tcl
Then the COBOL program passes it to tcl, and tcl creates this:
http://www.j3ksolutions.com/pdf/formlist.pdf from the above source tcl file.

If you're at all curious you can look at the COBOL source,
http://www.j3ksolutions.com/pdf/FRMLIST.cbl
Look for a paragraph called: Create-New-PDF.

For what its worth, COBOL is alive, and doing well. Example of Cobol, on
Windows/Unix reading Sqllite and writing to pdf.

Seems to me you could FTP your spoolfiles to Linux/Windows, do something
similar to my example, to read your spoolfiles, and write out the
pdfsource.tcl that represents the PCL found in the spoolfile. Thats what
I would do..... ummm.

Notice the COBOL "free" source format, no seq numbers and no column
constraints,

Now for something completely different,
Mike.

On 09/16/2011 05:47 PM, John Pitman wrote:
> Does anybody have any experience they can pass on here please?
> We have some fairly complex (in terms of lines and fonts) documents printed to paper (PCL5), but there is a request now to convert them to pdfs for emailing....
> I see there are products offered, but would feel happier if I had some guidance to ones that are known to work...
>
> thanks
> john
>
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