New features in PDFing v3

You can now specify 255 characters of addressing "tags" to address each spooled-file for PDFing. The command:

OVRPRTF FILE(yourfile) USRDFNDTA()

may be used, before the spooled-file is created. The value of the USRDFNDTA() parameter can be any set of "tags" such as:

'EMA=Postmaster@domain EMS=An email subject'

Note that tags specified in the "user-defined-data" do not require "URL encoding"

For *SCS and *USERACII spooled-files the output-queues must be configured as

DESTTYPE(*OS400) TRANSFORM(*NO)

See below for processing *AFPDS spooled-files.

We can now supply a simple "Transform Exit Program" that allows *AFPDS spooled-files to be addressed using user-defined-data and transmit its original spooled-file attributes such as form-type and user-data. If you currently have different output-queues for un-transformed and transformed spooled-files, this exit program will allow you queue any type of spooled-file on to one output-queue.

Please contact us directly for the CL source-code and configuration instructions. David Fowle

OS400 software like EZPRINT and FORMSPRINT produce spooled-files of type *USERASCII which contain PCL code. PDFing can now extract and convert the PCL when it is written from output-queues configured as DESTTYPE(*OS400). Because these packages do not duplicate "user-defined-text" from the original spooled-file PDFing will now read "tags" from the "user-defined-data" instead.

This feature was suggested by Bill Wragg, thanks Bill!

PDFing now has an embedded scripting language called Lua for PDFing. You may write scripts that customise PDFing's operations so as to suit your own particular requirements.

LuateX is an extension to the embedded Lua interpreter which allows you to convert spooled-files to to Microsoft Excel spreadsheet files. At this time, we are looking for examples of spooled-files to be converted to excel. Please contact David Fowle if you are interested and we will write the necessary scripts for you.

Users without a licensed copy of the NT Service version of PDFing can test this feature but a copyright note will added to output spreadsheets.

Opening the grid of spooled-files in v2.1 could take an excessive amount of time. V3 has speeded this up by a factor of 10. Because of the additional features in this release the [Destination] page of the configuration program has been split into two. The controls related to converting spooled-files have been moved on to the new [Convert] page.

You can now run up to 16 NT service controllers simultaneously. Each instance will have full access to the spooled-files processed by the NT service version of PDFing.

The [System] page of the configuration program allows you to enter the user-name and password required for an authenticated connection to a mail-server. Two new edit-boxes have been added to the [System] page of the configuration program to support this feature.

This may be useful in situations where the email server will not "relay" messages to recipients outside the server's domain.

If you have a licensed copy of the NT Service version of PDFing you can now set options to encrypt PDF files, so that changes to the PDF can be prevented and also that the PDF requires a password to be opened.

This version will allow 128bit encryption. There are two new "tags" for controlling encryption:

EEM=master-password
EEU=user-password

Users without a licensed copy of the NT Service version can test this feature but all passwords you specify are ignored and the password: Easy is always used.

The [LOG] page of the configuration program allows you to specify whether error-messages should be sent by email and the address to which they should be sent. The SMTP service must be active and you must select [YES] for the control labelled "Email Error Report?". If you leave the "Send to" edit-box empty, then the message will be sent back to the return-address specified for the spooled-file in error.

The "Default Markup" edit-box allows you to automatically select the markup to be applied to a spooled-file, based on that spooled-file's attributes. Any "special-characters" entered here are evaluated at run-time and used to locate the appropriate markup file.

The [Destination] page now contains two additional edit-boxes that may be used for this purpose.

If you specify a disk-storage location as the destination, The [Destination] page has an additional combo-box that allows you to specify that the necessary directorie(s) may be created dynamically.

You may now select the file extension for output ascii text-files. By default the extension is .asc but the [Convert] page has a new combo-box that you may use to specify .txt as an alternative file extension.

By default ascii text files are created with a form-feed character at the end of each page. The [Convert] page has a new combo-box that you may use to specify that these form-feed characters are omitted.

V2.1 allows for the PDF file to be saved to disk and a "notification" email (without file attachments) to be sent. In V3, the [Destination] page has an additional combo-box that allows you to specify that the files should also be attached to the notification email.

The [Destination] page has an edit-box that allows you to specify an additional email address. Any emails sent by PDFing to a specified address will also be sent to the specified extra address.

This release allows PCL macros to be added to the converted PDF. Please contact David Fowle for details.

Because some customers have requested PDF files for the Thai code-page, this version allows you to specify any true-type font instead of the default Courier font.

This feature will enable us to accomodate other (non-latin) code-pages as well.

Some customers reported visibility issues with the Adobe Type 1 fonts used to render the text in PDF files. For these customers an option "Darken Font?" was added to the [Page] configuration and markup pages. However the results when using this option was text that was rather too dark. This feature has been re-written and now provides, we believe, more readable documents.

For spooled-files written from output-queues configured as DESTTYPE(*OS400) TRANSFORM(*NO), PDFing can read and use information about page size and margins from the spooled-file attributes. The [Convert] page contains a new combo-box that allows you to select this feature.