Michel writes:

> I've been asked to find how to print barcodes from an HP3000 app to a
>  Laserjet 4+. I have quite no idea to start with. I looked at a LaserJet4P
>  manual to see if there was such a magical "font"... but there wasn't.
>  In addition to the printer type, I have another restriction. The document
>  (on which someone'd like to see the barcode)  already exists and its format
>  uses a Formation's Form (from Tymlabs) that we created many years ago.
>  Are there any people in this group who faced a similar situation? I would
>  appreciate any help!

I won't even put a <plug> notice around what I'm going to say here because
you're so unlikely to buy a $12,500 report writer to solve your printing
problems that it seems unnecessary, but I will tell you how we do what you
want in QueryCalc.

The first significant part of the solution is that we use PostScript as the
primary printing language; it provides an enormously richer printing
environment than does PCL. The second part is that all of the forms,
signatures, logos, and fonts are stored on the HP3000 and are created, merged
and downloaded directly within QueryCalc as it extracts data from the IMAGE
databases.

This is not as difficult as it seems. Indeed, because QueryCalc is built
around the idiom of a spreadsheet (hence its name), drawing a form using
lines & boxes and placing logos, signatures on the spreadsheet, and
specifying the fonts for particular cells is as easy and as straightforward
as you think it ought to be (and done very much the same way that you would
do it on a PC-based spreadsheet).

Because nothing other than the default 35 PostScript fonts are presumed to
reside on the printer, everything is downloaded from the HP3000 to the target
printer as it is required. This makes life very easy and very simple.
Paraphrasing Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, "In QueryCalc, the font lies not
in our printers but in our HP3000s." Because of this, font management becomes
extremely simple. More than that, it makes it extremely robust.

If you're an Adager customer, look at the UPS label on the package the next
time you receive an update. That mailing label, along with everything else in
the package that was obvioiusly printed on a laser printer, including the
tape label, was created within QueryCalc, on an HP3000, drawing your name and
address and machine information from an IMAGE database, completely
automatically. The UPS bar codes (which are only one of several standard bar
codes that QueryCalc currently supports) are downloaded and printed on the
fly. Indeed, even the UPS-standard logs and pickup sheets are generated by
QueryCalc at the same time and are printed out on their own separate printer.

Because this wound up sounding more like a sales pitch than I originally
intended, I'll finish this up with a </plug>. Nonetheless, it repeats a moral
that I preach every so often on this list: most of this kind of work can be
far better done within an HP3000 application than it can be by any other
means, including post-processed forms merging. What we're trying to do with
QueryCalc is to turn the HP3000 into a Macintosh-like device (simple,
reliable, robust, and very easy to understand and use). Given the quality of
the solution we have to start with, all that takes is a little good
engineering and the avoidance of inherently fragile solutions.

Wirt Atmar