The Four Hundred

One of the nice things about Client Access PC5250 is its print screen function. You can send the contents of 5250 display screens to any printer device just by selecting File, then Print Screen, from the menu bar. On a Windows desktop, the 5250 screen is generally printed to a Windows print driver, which formats the output and sends it to the target printer device.

PC5250's print screen function works well, but sometimes the Windows print driver does a poor job of formatting 5250 screen contents before printing it. The font style or size may obscure some screen printout information, sometimes even making the printed screen unreadable. In such cases, it comes in handy to know a few tricks for reformatting PC5250 print screen output.

The first trick is to understand that you can change PC5250 display printer output settings through the Page Setup dialogue, which is accessed by clicking the File and Page Setup selections from the menu bar. This dialogue allows you to change the characters per inch (CPI), the lines per inch (LPI), the maximum lines printed per page, the maximum characters per line, and the font type settings for printed screen output.

Be aware, however, that font types may be limited. The Client Access Express for Windows V5R1M0 install I tested for this article had less than 10 font styles that could be used. Generally, it's a good idea to use Courier-type fonts for printing PC5250 screens because they are fixed-width fonts, which can retain columnar formatting on your printouts. Express Client V5R1M0 offers two English Courier-style fonts: Courier W1 and Courier New.

If the Page Setup settings don't solve your print screen problems, you can assign a PDT (printer definition table) file to your printer setup. PDTs are interesting creatures that accept SNA Character Stream (SCS) print data from an iSeries or AS/400, and transform it into a PC printer data stream for PC-style printers. And the fun part is that, in PC5250, you can use a printer definition table to bypass your PC print driver and format the data more or less the way you want it to look.

While you can generate your own PDT file from PFTs (printer function tables), IBM provides a set number of predefined PDTs with each desktop PC5250 install. Since a PDT overrides the printer driver assigned to a PC5250 session, you can assign a PDT file on top of that driver for printing your output in the desired format.

To do this, click File, then Printer Setup, to go into the Printer Setup dialogue for your PC5250 session. On that screen, you'll notice a blank checkbox named Use PDT. Turn on that checkbox and click the Select PDT button on the screen. This takes you to a Select PDT file screen, where you can select one of several IBM-supplied PDT files. The PDT files are obscurely named, but you can figure out some of the printers they are meant to emulate by their names (for example, HPLJ4.PDT is an HP LaserJet 4). Your best bet is to experiment with assigning different PDTs to your PC5250 setup until you find one that works with your installation. This technique isn't as clear-cut as changing the Page Setup settings, but it will clear up your print screen output if you select the right PDT file.

Once you change any of the Page Setup settings or assign a PDT file to your PC5250 session, the changes will take effect immediately. But don't forget to save your changes by clicking File and Save, so the changes will remain active after you shut down and restart your PC5250 session.