Thank you!! I will try this today.

BWOC

Hi,

Does this only work with AFP printers?

Regards,

Martin Gilbert.

Hi, Martin.

I believe so. Printers on the iSeries must be of type *SCS or *IPDS. Only *IPDS printers can print the overlays, and only when the printer file is created to use device types that support it, such as *IPDS or *AFPDS. HOWEVER, I may well be wrong; I have not read all of the IBM iSeries printing redbook yet.

For what I am doing with AFP at present, I’m creating overlays for parts of pages and specifying them, NOT on the CRTPRTF command, but at format level in the PRTF DDS using the OVERLAY() keyword. This lets me position the overlays to 1/1000 of an inch. However, I then also need to use the POSITION() DDS keyword for every field in the format, to positioning the data within the overlay.

That’s mostly because I have been given the forms images in Excel, and they are too complex to re-do in any more sensible way. Being able to position each field exactly and independently is necessary in that situation.

So, in the PRTF DDS you get:

 *=====================================                                
                                                                       
A          R PNEWP                      TEXT('New Page')               
A                                       ENDPAGE                        
                                                                       
 *=====================================                                
                                                                       
A          R PHDR                       TEXT('Header')                 
A                                       OVERLAY(RUS1HDR &P1HDR &P2HDR) 
                                                                       
A            OPADR1        80           POSITION(&P1ADR1 &P2ADR1) CHRID
A            OPADR2        80           POSITION(&P1ADR2 &P2ADR1) CHRID

A            P1HDR          5S 3P 
A            P2HDR          5S 3P 
A            P1ADR1         5S 3P
A            P1ADR2         5S 3P 
A            P2ADR1         5S 3P 

…and so on. RUS1HDR is the name of the *OVL object in the library list. P1HDR is the vertical co-ordinate relative to the top of the page (0, usually), and P2HDR is the horizontal co-ordinate relative to the left of the page. These are set in the program.

In the same way, P1ADR1 and P2ADR1 are vertical and horizontal positioners for the fields.

You need the PNEWP format because you can’t use the ENDPAGE keyword in formats containing OVERLAY or POSITION.

Then, when you create the printer file, you use the following options:

DEVTYPE(*AFPDS) +
CPI(15) +
PAGESIZE(11.0 8.5 *UOM)
PAGRTT(0) +
LVLCHK(*NO) +
FRONTMGN(0 0)

Of course, page size here is A4, and CPI sets the font size; and the Unit of Measure is inches. These things could be different for your work.

Maybe more information than you wanted, but perhaps it will be useful.

Sloopy

Actually, I have a number of HP 1320n’s which are not IPDS that print overlays just fine, as do my Lexmark T640 and W840.

You just seem to have to have compiled the printer file as device type *AFPDS (or use an ovrprtf to change it).

If it’s an SCS device type then the overlay won’t print. That’s been my experience, anywho.

Yes, Koohiisan, we have an HP 9050n here that is defined to our iSeries as SCS, but which does print the overlay – very confusing!

However, it prints all the fields in different positions to the positions printed by our IBM Infoprint 1130 – this means that we can either design the forms to print on the IBM OR the HP, but not both. There is obviously an emulator involved, but not an accurate one.

It sometimes seems to me that printing anything from a computer is more to do with witchcraft than science….

Sloopy

Yes, Sloopy, I too have noticed oddball alignment issues between our IPDS IBM InfoPrint 1120 and any other printer. I thought the 1120 of ours was just misconfigured.

I was helping an associate with overlays the other day and the alignment was all totally off: none of the DDS print fields he was using were within the boxes on his form overlay. Finally, just on an off-the-wall thought, we set the front offset to something like .1 .1 and it magically all lined up! I had previously given up on making any of my overlaid print files work on both IPDS and non-IPDS printers…but now I’m interested to try tweaking the margin ever so slightly.

Notably, in this case there was nothing really wrong with the margin, and the .1 .1 adjustment was not at all near enough to have really fixed the text alignment issue–it just happened to have been enough to make the printer draw the page differently. Weird… Perhaps there is a certain required margin amount for the overlays that is not applied to the normal DDS text and fields. Who knows…

Hope this does not add to the confusion.
There are two types of overlays supported on the AS/400. This is what IBM sayd about using the OVERLAY keyword in a printer file: “Specify DEVTYPE(*AFPDS) on the CRTPRTF command when OVERLAY is specified in the file. If DEVTYPE is changed to anything other than *AFPDS, the keyword is ignored and a warning message is issued at print time.”

When an overlay is specified as a parm in the print file, i.e. “Front side overlay (FRONTOVL)” on the CRTPRTF command, that file can be printed on a wide variety of printers, not just *AFPDS printers.

Its the OVERLAY keyword IN the print file that is quite restricted.

By the way, IBM Printing redbook has two chapters dedicated to this topic. Its very well done.

We can generate an overlay and provide you with a command you can program into your application. carlos.lara@typehaus.com