Color printouts and color PDFs on i5/OS – a complete disaster
This is a topic that i’ve spent fighting for the past year. A solution is still not in sight, but i decided to publish all this stuff anyway – so that it might help someone with the same problem to know that they’re not alone.
The problem starts early. If you want to print with color from i5/OS, you’ll need FS45 capable IPDS printers. Some IPDS ROMs support this, and so does ExcelliPrint. Pay attention that not all IPDS ROMs support FS45.
The next step is to create a color overlay. I’ve written about this in the past, involving a cumbersome way through a TIFF printer and tiff2afp. Those of you familiar with overlays know that there’s IBM’s AFP printer driver, but that doesn’t handle colors correctly. About 3/4 years ago, i’ve opened my first PMR about this problem.
This was PMR 33480, involving a bizarre, month long debate with IBM, which first didn’t acknowledge the problem, and later promised a fix in 2Q07.
A few weeks ago, i’ve opened PMR 61439, which was just a request for the fix promised in 2Q07. One of the best excerpts from that PMR is
What is an .eps file? Googling shows
“encapsulated postscript”? When I try to open it with any PC
application I have, it says it cannot process the file. Do they have a
sample image that can be opened with the basic microsoft software that
is installed on an IBM corporate PC?
I found it quite ridiculous that an IBM printing support person didn’t know what EPS is. But even funnier than this was the end of the PMR, with a simple statement:
Unfortunately, there is no estimated date on
when color support can be improved.
Which means “we won’t fix this”. Again, there is a suitable workaround using tiff2afp, which i’ve documented here. That’s only half of the problem.
The second half of the problem is the creation of color PDFs on your i5/OS instance. PDF is a very important format if you’re sending electronic bills, etc. IBM’s InfoPrint Server product (5722-IP1) handles this. Unfortunately, the performance for the generation of a single page color PDF is abysmal – about 5 minutes on a usual customer system, and about 30 second on one of IBM’s high performance testing systems.
I would consider a PDF generation time of about 10 or maybe 15 seconds on a very low end system acceptable – 5 minutes is way out of dimension. Again, i’ve opened a PMR on this topic. This is PMR 61235. Again, it took over a month of forth and back with IBM until they told me again that this won’t be fixed.
Another funny thing in that PMR is that IBM support tried to contact me on the 1st of August – which is a swiss national holiday. Looks like they lack a concept to know when people aren’t working…
The PRTPDF job is spending most of its time in CPU, this
is due to processing. If the amount of processing (work)
can not be reduced then a faster processor may be
required.
IBM’s way to solve this problem is to through a faster CPU at it. This might be reasonable, but my ThinkPad T60 with CutePDF just needs 5 seconds to generate a multipage, color PDF, and cost 2000 CHF – all the while a System i5 with appropriate i5/OS licenses costs 15’000 CHF minimum – but is not capable of generating color PDFs in less than 10 seconds.
Color printing, easy creation of overlays, and fast generation of color PDFs are essential for a business. Currently, i5/OS does not provide this, and IBM refuses to fix these problems.
If anyone knows a solution to one of the problems stated above, i would be very interested.
Buck:
Lukas, I don’t think there is a good IBM-only colour printing solution and I used to work for an IBM business partner. Most of the high quality colour printing I was involved with was done on Xerox printers by embedding various printer control codes in the spooled file that were interpreted by the big Xerox and coupled with a Xerox overlay created by a Xerox expert.
23. August, 2007, 21:59–buck