Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog

ExcelliPrint is an excellent software package to enable IPDS on a plain, PCL5 capable printer. With release 3.2, Excelliprint now fully works with Host-Resident fonts.

This enables you to print OCR-B from your System i without having to buy the fonts as a printer module, or buying memory for the printer to download fonts to.

Now for those of you who don’t work with ERP Systems in Switzerland - OCR-B is a font used on many Swiss financial documents for better automated scanning of those. It’s usually needed if you print bills with an attached ‘Einzahlungsschein’.

Setting up host resident fonts on i5/OS isn’t difficult, but the whole process isn’t well documented.

So here’s a very quick run through.

First, you’ll need to fonts in 300 DPI resolution on your system. The default fonts supplied as AFP compatibility fonts (5722SS1 Option 8) are 240 DPI fonts, unsuitable for printing.

With your shipping of i5/OS, you should have received a CD called IBM AFP Font Collection. You’ll need to restore three libraries from this CD:

RSTLIB SAVLIB(LA1300) DEV(OPT01) RSTLIB(QFNT300LA1)
RSTLIB SAVLIB(OCR300) DEV(OPT01) RSTLIB(QFNT300OCR)
RSTLIB SAVLIB(CDEPAG) DEV(OPT01) RSTLIB(QFNT300CPL)

If you do not have this CD, you can get the fonts from any other System that has them.

The next step is to create an appropriate font mapping table:

CRTFNTTBL FNTTBL(*PHFCS)

Now you’ll need to add mappings for OCR-B to that table (and also for all the other fonts you use):

ADDFNTTBLE FNTTBL(*PHFCS) PHFCS((3 144 *NONE 1269) (C0920BB0))

This example is just OCR-B. You’ll need other fonts for all your documents to print pretty. You can view your font table with DSPFNTTBL.

The last step is to reconfigure the PSF Configuration Object for your printer to use Host-Resident fonts.

CHGPSFCFG PSFCFG(EXCELLPSF) RESFONT(*NO) DEVRSCLIBL(QFNT300LA1 QFNT300CPL QFNT300OCR)

(Most of the research for this walkthrough was made by Ralf Christen)