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This page is the portal for all things PDF® in RPM Remote Print Manager®.
PDF is of course a registered trademark and the sole property of Adobe Systems Incorporated..
Specifically, RPM generates PDF from a variety of sources. The purpose of this page is to explain how that works.
Two methods to produce PDF
The Transforms Portal explains what transforms are and provides a current list.
RPM has two strategies for producing PDF directly. 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.
The second strategy is to convert PCL, the Hewlett Packard printer language, into PDF.
Text to PDF
First, we can convert any of the following:
| Data type | Transform | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ASCII text | Text markup | If you get "noise characters" try several code pages, such as Latin 1, UTF-8, etc |
| EBCDIC | Text markup | Select an EBCDIC code page |
| SCS | SCS | The SCS file might specify an international code page, or you can select one that RPM provides |
| text in any code page we can convert to Unicode | 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) | ASA | n/a |
Any of these can be converted into PDF. The way we do that is:
Original data → Any transforms that produce text markup → Text Markup to PDF transform → PDF data
Note that the text markup to PDF transform produces PDFs with searchable text. This will benefit you when reading a PDF and looking for specific entries; also, if you feed these PDFs into an indexing system such as document management, you will enjoy full text search.
PCL to PDF
Second, we can convert PCL data, for instance a job that is normally 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 actually provided in the PCL. Many print jobs use a custom font, defined in the job, or they use graphics. This commonly happens with forms such as checks. The only text that appears in the print job might be the check number, date, and payee.