RPM Print-to Portal

Purpose

RPM Remote Print Manager® provides several ways to send your print jobs directly to outputs, including printers, archives, PDFs, and email.

RPM has always printed to Windows printers (aka text printing) and printed directly to printers using the Windows port (but not the print driver). We've called the latter raw printing, though "direct printing" could also fit.

It's hard to say which was the favorite among those; some customers used the "raw" print only, like a traditional print server only with more options.

Others depended on Windows printing. We would hear from them about font issues and how text lined up, particularly how text fit within the margins. RPM has a lot of horsepower in sizing text, but sometimes you have to supervise the actual text settings.

More outputs

Adding to these two mainstays, we adopted the following from customer requests:

• Print to file: beefed up our ability to archive print jobs
• Print to PDF: generating PDFs from print jobs was a priority when we designed RPM 5.0
• Print to email: attach a print job to an email, or in some cases convert directly to an email

Print to file

RPM can archive your print jobs to disk. We provide the following benefits:

• RPM makes job metadata plus the current date and time available to form a filename. You fill in the format you want, and RPM does the rest.
• RPM, by default, does filename collision so that you won't be overwriting one print job with another
• RPM can run any transforms on your data before archiving. You can send SCS data from an iSeries and get RPM to save as plain text. You can save print jobs as HTML files or PCL. Of course, we provide broad support for PDF.
• RPM can also use login credentials to print directly to a network folder.

See the Archive Portal for more information.

Print to PDF

RPM has several ways to print to PDF: text conversion and PCL conversion. Both offer true page fidelity; the PDF looks the same as if it had rolled out on your printer.

Also, we embed the original text in the PDF file, so you can use your favorite document indexing system or PDF viewer and continue to use full-text search.

Please see the PDF portal for more discussion.

Print to email

RPM now sends your print job in an email. You fill in the "from" and "to" addresses. RPM can use job metadata for the message subject.

We provide two methods for sending your print job. If you have used the transforms to translate the job to either plain text or HTML, then you can send the job as the email message itself.

The most typical case is sending the print job as an attachment. Here it doesn't matter what the print job format is. You still get to choose the name of the attachment using job metadata.

Please see the Email Action page for more information.