Printing to a file instead of physical printer!

[MrProgrammer]

Hello,
We use Infoprint Manager 3.1 on AIX 4.3 system. As you know, printing mechanism of infoprint manager contains some parts like logical destinations, actual destinations, physical destinations etc. Besides, we can define various transforms at different levels to convert input data from some format to another format. No matter what transforms we define, the final data is always sent to a physical printer. The logic is all built on this logic (naturally). But we have an extraordinary objective. We want to print the final data into a file which can be in postscript, pcl or afp format. To achieve this objective, there must be a way of adding a file as a physical printer or we must be able to redirect the output of the job submitting programs (pdpr) to a file that we determine..

Note: In general, the data to print is a line sequential text file and there are form definition, page definition and overlay files (specified in an .ATT file). So the final data that we want to write into a file instead of a physical printer, must have been processed according to these resource files before it has been written into the file.

Thanks in advance!

 

[motoslide]

What flavor of UNIX?
If you can "disable" the desired printer, then run your job, you should be able to find the pending file in an lp temp directory somewhere on your system (location subject to changed based on flavor of UNIX).
Another alternative would be to create a new serial printer and specify a fake port (like /dev/keepthedata). The problem here would be that you could only see the final job, so the file would have to be copied elsewhere after each print job.

 

[motoslide]

Sorry, I should have re-read your post. You state which flavor of UNIX. An AIX knowledgeable person should be able to point you to the spooler's temporary folder where pending printjobs reside.

 

[KenCunningham]

The print jobs should be in /var/spool/lpd/qdir

Hope this helps.