RPM's PDF Creation Capabilities

Thu, 06/13/2024 - 13:49 By Dave Brooks

This page is the portal for all things PDF® for RPM Remote Print Manager® (RPM).

PDF is, of course, a registered trademark and the sole property of Adobe Systems Incorporated.

Specifically, RPM generates PDFs from a variety of sources. The purpose of this page is to explain how that works.

Two methods to produce PDF

RPM has two strategies for creating PDF directly.

  1. The first is to convert a text-based file into an intermediate form which we call text markup. Then we translate the text markup into PDF.
  2. The second strategy is to convert PCL, the Hewlett-Packard printer language, into PDF.

Text to PDF

We can convert any of the following:

ASCII text

  • Use Text markup
  • Notes: if you get "noise characters" try several code pages, such as Latin 1, UTF-8, etc

EBCDIC

  • Use Text markup
  • Notes: select an EBCDIC code page for input

SCS

  • Use SCS
  • Notes: the SCS file might specify an international code page, or you can choose one that RPM provides

Text in any code page we can convert to Unicode

  • Use Text markup
  • Note that the text markup transform translates from whatever code page to UTF-8, so if your input file is already UTF-8, select that in the "input" setup

ASA (Fortran carriage control)

  • Use ASA
  • Nothing specific for this data type

Any of these converts to PDF. The way we do that is:

Original data → Any transforms that produce text markup → Text Markup to PDF transform → PDF data

The text markup to PDF transform creates PDFs with searchable text. You benefit when you read a PDF and look for specific entries; if you feed these PDFs into an indexing system such as document management, you will enjoy a full-text search.

PCL to PDF

Second, we can convert PCL data, for instance, a job that is typically sent to a printer, into PDF:

PCL data → PCL to PDF transform → PDF data

PCL to PDF is an Elite-only function.

The PDF produced by the PCL to PDF transform has searchable text to the extent that text is included in the PCL. Some print jobs use a custom font defined in the job or graphics with forms such as checks. In this case, the only text that appears in the print job might be the check number, date, and payee.

Note: if you require text from these kinds of print jobs, there are third party products which can do that. Please contact Red Titan for more information.