Solving PC5250 Printing Problems and Tweets About i/OS Error Messages

I’m having problems with printing my iSeries Access Personal Communications PC5250 screens. Every time I print a screen, it comes out in a large font and the letters run on top of each other, making the text unreadable. How can I straighten out this issue? We’re running iSeries Access for Windows V5R4M0.

–Bob

This is an issue with your PC5250 setup and you should be able to solve it in one of two ways.

The first thing you’ll want to check is your PC5250 Page Setup function. The Page Setup function allows you to designate the following standard text parameters for your PC5250 printouts.

• Characters per inch (CPI) and Lines per inch (LPI)–As the name implies, CPI and LPI designate the number of characters and lines that will be printed in an inch of screen shot printout. If your printouts look smashed together, you can adjust these settings to provide more space between your characters and lines.
• Max Lines per Page and Max Characters per Line–You can also try adjusting these settings for maximum readability on your printed screens.
• Font–There are about 10 different font types you can select for your printed screen output. If your screens are hard to read, you may want to change your current font type. Courier New is a good font choice because it aligns your output to retain printed character data in the original column alignment that it possessed on your computer screen.

Your Page Setup screen will look something like this.

Once you’ve adjusted these settings, type File, Printer Setup from the PC5250 menu bar to make sure that your screen prints are using the settings that you just applied on the Page Setup screen. The Printer Setup screen will look something like this.

To use Page Setup options for your screen printouts, make sure that the Use PDT check box is unchecked. Click OK and then try test printing a screen shot by selecting File, Print Screen from the PC5250 menu bar. Hopefully these setup changes will correct your screen print issues.

If you’re still having problems with readable font size on your PC5250 screen shots, you can also configure PC5250 to format your output according to a predefined Printer Definition Table (PDT) file. A PDT file specifies how characters and control codes are transferred to a printer and what printer output format is used when printing from PC5250. PC5250 comes with a limited number of PDT files. A PDT will bypass your selected Windows printer driver and format your printouts according to the parameters in the PDT. I’ve had particular luck using the HP PCL5 printer control language PDT (hppcl5.pdt) for my PC5250 screen shots.

To change PC5250 printing to use PDT formatting, click on File, Printer Setup to get to the Printer Setup window. Click on the Use PDT check box (check) to enable PDT printing. To select the PDT file to use for your PC5250 session, click on the Select PDT button to retrieve a list of available PDT files from the Select PDT file screen. Select the PDT file that you want to use, click on the OK button twice and your PC5250 session will start using your selected PDT file to format your print screen output.

If you’re unsure what type of formatting each PDT file does, IBM offers a list of Printer Definition Files for use with PC5250 that you can consult to understand what each file is designed to do.

HTH

–Joe

Good article on monitoring message queues. In the error notification tools that you listed, you might want to also check out Kisco Information Systems’ SNDTWEET software. SNDTWEET will Tweet the error message using Twitter for Short Messaging Service (SMS) functions. The product will even allow the message to be responded to via Twitter.

–Rich Loeber, Kisco Information Systems

This is another fine package that will also do the job of monitoring and alerting i/OS administrators to error messages in a system message queue. When you’re looking for a message monitoring package for your iSeries, System i, or Power i system, SNDTWEET should also be considered along with Help/Systems’ Robot/ALERT, Bytware’s MessengerConsole, QSystem Monitor from CCSS, Halcyon Software’s IBM i Monitoring, Scheduling & Automation Software, or SEA’s absMessage package.

–Joe

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Admin Alert: Basic i/OS Error Monitoring and Response, Part 1

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