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CoolSpools
Features
CoolSpools provides a number of useful features available from few if any other similar products on the market.
Support for AFP, IPDS and other file types as well as SCS spooled files
Many businesses have moved on from traditional iSeries line-printer reports and are using AFP (Advanced Function Printing) or IPDS (Intelligent Printer Data Stream) to improve the presentation of their reports. AFP in particular allows you to incorporate variable, proportional fonts, and graphics into your reports to improve their appearance, and to use page segments and overlays to simplify programming.
Most other products which convert spooled files are limited to old-fashioned SCS (SNA Character String) spooled files. CoolSpools supports AFP, IPDS, line and *USERASCII (PCL) spooled files as well as SCS. This support includes the reproduction of images, line graphics, fonts, overlays, page segment, barcodes etc. when the spooled file is being converted to a format which can display these (such as PDF).
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An example of an AFP spooled file using an overlay and containing images, colors, graphics and barcodes, converted to PDF using CoolSpools. |
CoolSpools has the ability to split a single spooled file into several separate stream files.
Perhaps you have an application which creates a single spooled file containing invoices for a number of customers. You can now ask for the spooled file to be split into separate pdf files for each customer. You can ask for splitting to occur:
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every so many pages |
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every time a specified key word or phrase appears in the spooled file |
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every time an area of the spooled file changes |
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by comparing an area of the spooled file to a given value (e.g. when an area of the page contains the value "Page 1") |
You can instruct CoolSpools to call user-written exit programs at various in the processing of a spooled file:
The exit programs are passed a standard set of parameters. These can include a number of text strings extracted from the spooled file according to criteria that you define.
Coupled with the ability to split spooled files described above, this gives you the power to adapt existing applications to the challenge of distributing reports and documents via e-mail rather than snail mail.
For example, you could tell CoolSpools to split your invoices spooled file into separate PDF files for each customer, and ask it to call an exit program after each PDF file has been created. CoolSpools could extract the customer number from the spooled file and pass it to the exit program as a parameter. The exit program could then retrieve the customer's e-mail address from the database and invoke a mail application to send the PDF file to the customer.
CoolSpools can also combine several spooled files into a single PDF. You can also merge together PDFs create by other applications. As far as we are aware, CoolSpools is the only iSeries PDF generator which has this ability.
If you have a suite of reports, which are created as separate spooled files, you can use the STMFOPT(*ADD) when creating PDF files to enable you to generate a single PDF containing all of the reports. You could also bring in one or more PDFs created by another application.
If your AFP report includes color, CoolSpools will reproduce those colors in your PDF or HTML output.
However, if you would like to add color to your reports but can’t afford an iSeries color printer, CoolSpools can still help. You simply specify a color for both the text and background of your report and CoolSpools will use those colors in PDF and HTML.
Alternatively, you might want to re-code your report to use colors, but print the PDF output on an affordable PC color printer rather than a mega-bucks iSeries printer.
Where the iSeries font used in your report is not available to PDF, CoolSpools will attempt to choose a suitable alternative font. However, this may not always give acceptable results. No matter: CoolSpools provides your with the information you need to specifying how fonts in the report should be mapped, thus ensuring that the resultant PDF document is as close as possible in appearance to the original report.
This popular feature of CoolSpools allows you to go further than just creating a copy of your report in PDF: you can actually enhance the content of your report too by creating a set of bookmarks in you report which help your users navigate around the report on screen and go quickly and easily to the information they require.
Bookmarks can be created based on either a piece of text which appears regularly at the same position on each page, or by means of a keyword or phrase (e.g. "Customer name:") which labels the information you wish to use to create the bookmarks.
The data in your PDF files is held in compressed format. This can dramatically reduce the size of the files created, making them quicker and easier to e-mail and load, and making PDF even more attractive as an option for archiving your reports.
PDF files are "linearized", that is they are structured in a way that minimizes the time it takes to open the file over the Web or your Wide Area Network.