New RPM 7 is now available — see what’s new →

RPM SNA Character Set (SCS) Transform

Screenshots in this article are from RPM 7.0.

Converts SNA Character Set (SCS) files, typically System i spooled files (iSeries, AS/400, etc.) to text markup

Purpose

RPM has translated SCS since the early versions. Whenever we mention to an iSeries user that RPM does this, the comment we usually get is “that makes sense”.

By translating SCS into text markup you can, with 2 or 3 steps, produce:

  • Windows print
  • PDF
  • PCL for an HP printer
  • email message
  • plain text

Please see our iSeries support page for more ideas.

Setup

With most formats, the setup will determine your end results. It’s different with SCS. Here, the file itself might override anything you set below … or it might not. We recommend that you specify the minimum settings you need, with the caveat that the original designer of the print job, in this case, has the last word.

  • Page Margins The Top, Bottom, Left and Right margins, in inches.
  • Vertical Select Use to scale the font height so the page holds the number of lines you enter, per Page or per Inch. Note: To work out lines per inch: LPI = Lines / (Paper Height - (top margin + bottom margin))
  • Horizontal Select Use to scale the font width so each line holds the number of characters you enter, per Line or per Inch. Note: To work out characters per inch: CPI = Characters / (Paper Width - (left margin + right margin))
  • Portrait / Landscape The orientation of the output.
  • Font The button shows the current font (Courier New, 10pt by default). Click it to set the initial font. SCS can change the font face and size during the course of printing.
  • Set font height to N % of line height (leading) With Vertical or Horizontal in use, the font’s height as a percentage of each line, from 70 to 100. The rest is space between the lines. The default is 91.
  • Input Code Page The EBCDIC encoding used on the host. The default is IBM037, US English. Click Find By Alias to pick one by another of its names.
  • Wrap lines Add line breaks if a line does not fit within the printable width of the paper. If not selected, long lines will be truncated.
  • Remove control characters Non-whitespace characters with an ASCII value less than 0x19 will be removed.
  • Suppress blank pages If the document has any blank pages, they will not be printed. You may want this option turned off if you are printing duplex documents.