Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog

HPT (Host Print Transform) allows the System i to print to non-IPDS printers. However, documentation from IBMs side is rather sparse or hard to find. I usually remember the phrase “support for various ascii printers”, and search for it. Currently, it gets us to IBM’s HPT Page.

HPT works with almost all printers that support PCL/PS. No, your cheap SOHO host-based network printers won’t work. But if you have an older Printer without network attachment, you can even use HPT together with iSeries Access (see the checkmark “Let host handle conversion to ASCII” in the connection setup screen).

If you’re using a network printer, remember to set the SYSDRVPGM option. This allows even advanced job control to work flawlessly from i5/OS.