It never ceases to amaze me how often I begin doing a review only to discover what I am reviewing is something that I could use myself. In this case, OpenSeas’ OpenPDF addresses a problem that I had been working with for a while in a number of areas.

OpenPDF has one fundamental purpose in life: to convert PCL files to PDF (Portable Document Format). PDF is from Adobe, and is essentially a derivative of PostScript meant for viewing. It’s extremely common on the Internet as a method for deploying non-HTML documents. I’m sure you’ve run into it many times when surfing the ’net. There are several very nice features of PDF — it displays on your screen very cleanly, and it will always print as good as your printer is able. It always seems to print consistently for me.

By integrating OpenPDF with a forms package such as Fantasia (which is the package currently tested for the OpenSeas product, but they say you can use any HP 3000 forms package), you can take full advantage of your current infrastructure to easily distribute your HP 3000’s forms and reports via e-mail or on the Internet. The reports and forms become PDF files, which can be read by the free Acrobat reader available from Adobe’s Web site.

While OpenPDF doesn’t work with standard carriage control files, you can get a companion product called SpoolPDF that will do this. This product was in beta test when I looked at it, but appears to do the job, and answers the final question for people not using PCL.

According to OpenSeas, OpenPDF is a software port of pcl2pdf, the industry-leading product for PCL to PDF conversions, supplied by Visual Software of Dorking UK.

How does it work?

The program couldn’t be easier to use. There is a single executable file that you run with an INFO string to specify the input and output spoolfile. Figure 1 below shows an example of the syntax that is available.

Usage: RUN OPENPDF;info=Ó[PclFilename] [PdfFilename]
                          [-S] [-PAGES] [-BYTES] [-NOWIN] [-NOUNI]
                          [-P] [-L] [-A4] [-LETTER] [-LEGAL]
                          [-MEM] [-LOG] [-M:#] [-T:Õ...Õ]
                          [-LT:#] [-RL:#] [-RU] [-BM:#]
                          [-SC:#] [-TT] [-FLAT]Ó
Where:
    PclFilename      Pathname of the input pcl file to convert
    PdfFilename      Pathname of the output file to create

                            

The program will overwrite any existing file that you have specified as an output file regardless of what it is. There don’t appear to be any switches to avoid this behavior, and this is probably my only concern with the product.

The -FLAT switch will allow you to process a standard MPE flat file into a PDF document. This feature can come in handy with files that don’t have CCTL in them.

Features

The switches that you provide to OpenPDF are basically broken into two categories. The first category controls the environment — you can suppress the banner, display processing statistics, and so on.

The second category controls the output environment. An example is -P and -L for Portrait and Landscape. While OpenPDF can usually figure out what to do, you might have a circumstance where you have to force it. Other features allow you to specify a number of pages, so if you’re testing some large report, you can just convert the first few pages, check it out, and make adjustments.

OpenPDF gives you the ability to control the header and margins, as well as scale the report to increase or decrease its size so it fits differently on the page.

Installation and Documentation

You can get the software on a CD or DDS tape, but I had it e-mailed to me. All I needed was the documentation and the single executable file. I uploaded it to my HP 3000, and that was it. Everything worked without problems, and the program needs no special capabilities.

The documentation is only 13 pages, and half of that is disclaimers and such, so it’s a quick and easy read. All the options I used worked, and it was straightforward to go through both the documentation and manual.

The Test Drive

I took a few different PCL files that I had lying around and ran them through the translator, and was able to convert a 10-page document in just a second or so. I downloaded the files as binary files and loaded them up in Acrobat, and that was it. The document came out beautiful, printed perfectly as well, and I was very pleased with the results.

I tried out the flat file option as well, and that came out very clean — well, as clean as a flat file will look. For the carriage control files I tested, the beta test version of SpoolPDF appeared to work as well. I didn’t get a chance to try out a bunch of escape sequences, so I can’t attest to how well that might work.

Overall everything worked, and the program was simple to use. I would like to try setting this up with Samba/iX so that I could open the files without transferring them, but I haven’t gotten Samba working yet on my HP 3000. Between Apache, Samba and e-mail programs for the HP 3000, you have a variety of delivery options available to you.

Conclusions

This is really a nifty little tool. It’s obviously not for everyone, but it’s small, fast, easy to use and has a definite purpose in life. This is a very clean solution for doing something like attaching reports on the 3000 to an e-mail that the HP 3000 sends. The PDF will come out looking great on the screen as well as on paper. Another important point is that you will preserve the page breaks, formatting and any embedded graphics much better than using HTML as a report vehicle.

OpenSeas really needs to update their Web site, however, since during my TestDrive there was no information there on this product. Other than that, I would say this is a great product.