I fielded a call today from a potential new customer who had been using another product to convert ASA Carriage Control files, commonly found in older Fortran-based systems, for printing to a Windows-based printer. Our application, RPM Remote Print Manager, has been able to do this conversion for many years. The legacy program, called Uniprint, was registered on a computer that recently crashed, and recovering Uniprint's files and moving them to a new computer failed because the software needed to be registered. The caller mentioned they could not get in touch with the developer of the application to activate it on the new computer. At that point, the search was on for a replacement.
Uniprint was invoked by the in-house Fortran program which passed several command-line arguments to specify the orientation, font size, and other output options. To replace some of it, I suggested one of the lesser-known, but powerful RPM features (Apply COR to Text Markup) which automatically rotates the page and sizes the font based on the text width and height. In addition, I showcased the PDF transform which converts the document to a fully searchable PDF. Ultimately, the caller was so impressed with the PDF output that they may abandon the printed output in favor of it.
One other potential feature that will go hand-in-hand with the PDF output is the Elite-only Data Extraction transform. The names of these PDF documents are not super friendly. Still, the recipient's name appears in the data file which can be extracted and used to name the PDF file which will make it extremely simple for the recipient to identify their documents. This company might eventually use the extracted data to email the PDF documents to the recipient, but that will become a story for another day. No matter whether they use the email or PDF functionality, RPM is equipped, today, with the ability to do either...or both.