MPRINT: VAX printing made simple
IL (United States) Argonne National Lab., T.G. Worlton, USDOE, Washington, DC (United States) · 1994
Users with stand-alone personal computers and personal printers usually find printing simple, but on a VAX computer or VAX cluster there may be many printers of different types located in different areas. The print queues set up for these printers may require different form qualifiers and may not all be able to print all documents. This article describes the basic steps a VAX system manager should take in setting up and managing print queues on a VAX and tells how to access these queues from a VAX, Unix, Macintosh, or DOS Computer. It gives a basic overview, but includes several helpful items that are obscure or completely undocumented. Following this overview, there is a description of a Fortran program, MPRINT, written to simplify printing for users. The MPRINT program simplifies the choice of printers and print forms for users of VAX print queues by allowing them to select from a one line per queue menu. The menu includes queue descriptions and only lists printers which can correctly print the specified file. MPRINT selects the correct form to use based on file type and maximum record length of the file. MPRINT may be useful at your site, and provides examples of a number of system services. MPRINT includes routines to do a user open of a file and get information from the File and Record Access Blocks (FAB and RAB), and a routine to obtain information about print queues. There are also routines to parse a file name, detab a character buffer, and trim trailing nulls and blanks from a character string.