I am not sure if the title really describes what this post is about. The germ for this post came from an email I received from Elbert Cook. He asked me about emulating output specifications in a modern RPG program. Modern free format RPG does not support output specifications. I am pleased about this. I can get far more functionality and make changes many times faster by creating my own printer file than I would making changes to an output specification. Some have argued to me that printer files are too new for them to use, which is not true as I first used them when this operating system was OS/400 and it was running one of the releases of version 2. Let me stress that what I describe in this post is NOT a case for creating something like output specifications. Use custom printer files. There are times where I have created printed output from a program I was testing or developing that was so “down and dirty” I did not want to spend my time creating a printer file for. This post is based upon the methods I have used, and some examples from Elbert. Read more » Read More
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