Printing from Hercules and IBM MVS 3.8 - or any other OS - M39

[@lavaq9593]

This is a great product! Thank you Fish & Moshix! I discovered that you have to keep HercPrt running and let Hercules/MVS shut it down. If you manually, prematurely, close HercPrt, it hangs JES2.

[@James_Butler]

I bought HercPrt but have not got my download email. I did try it out with the unpaid trial copy and it works great. I like the greenbar default font on the pdf output. Reminds me of school and work back in the day.

[@mikkoniska8235]

Thanks for the tip, purchased the HercPrt and am really happy with the produced output from executed jobs. I also know how I am going to create my next CV :)

[@moshixmainframechannel]

Great. Happy for you. Happy new year

[@mannym5365]

Great video as always, thank you!

[@mannym5365]

HercPrt works great. Is there a way to keep output in the HELD queue (and view it with 3.8-OUTLIST) ? I have been trying to change the class and also turned off HercPrt, no success. Thank you

[@bzert281]

Moshix, do we have the experience of being able to directly attach a printer (i had a big Genicom dot-band printer i had to get rid of, sadly) to where we could start/stop/interrupt/restart it directly under JES2 control like we used to do synchronously with 1403s, 3203s, etc? I miss the operator experience of hearing the printer "sing" the separator pages so i knew my job output was done and i could tear it off the stacker.

[@moshixmainframechannel]

Yes, of course. That all works just like before. Lots of people attach a real printer to MVS on Hercules

[@gilbertmella4368]

Very nice! I have been trying to print out the prime PL/I prime source list by putting a P next to PRIMPLI, but nothing is printed. What am I missing?

[@moshixmainframechannel]

Run it with msgclass=A

[@gilbertmella4368]

@@moshixmainframechannel Thank you for your reply, but it doesn't do it. What I mean is printing the source code without executing it.

[@moshixmainframechannel]

@@gilbertmella4368 then you have to do an IEBPTPCH in batch

[@gilbertmella4368]

@@moshixmainframechannel Thank you so much, Moshix, that works! :) :)

[@asyongmatipid2]

I installed a dot matrix printer font in Windows 10 but it doesn't appear on the HercPRT PDF options font name drop down menu. Is there any way to add it to that menu? Would be nice to get a vintage looking PDF printout.

[@moshixmainframechannel]

Needs to be a truetype font

[@asyongmatipid2]

@@moshixmainframechannel Thanks for the info. I'll see if I can find a TTF version of that font. If it works you'll earn a new subscriber.

[@lavaq9593]

I have an HP Desktop with Windows 10. It has an attached WiFi & Line connected HP printer. I cannot get Fish's app to run past Printer ID IP. Spectrum has 3 authentication levels. It's not clear in the "help" file how I can get connected. It seems I can name the printer anything {not necessarily an IP address}, but I don't understand the iNET address. Is this my PC IP? I try it and it fails.

[@scottbubel3555]

Very nice video. I have a question though. I can't seem to get the 1403 vintage font to appear in the available fonts list in HercPRT 1.6. I Installed the font in Widows 7.

[@moshixmainframechannel]

Is it a truefont ?

[@scottbubel3555]

No, it's installed as an Open Type font (.otf). Renaming it as a true type font (.ttf) doesn't work.

[@moshixmainframechannel]

You need TrueType for hercprt

[@scottbubel3555]

Would thet be the Limited 1403 vintage font?

[@moshixmainframechannel]

Yes but ask for truetype

[@peterjacob8871]

HERCPRT I really like the idea of getting oldstyle printer output. I tried the HERCPRT trial version, applied the "devinit 00e localhost:1403 sockdev", and successfully connected HERCPRT with MVS. I then submitted several batch jobs MSGCLASS=A, but HERCPRT didn't transfer any output into my spooler directory. There is a *.tmp file opened but it never receives any output. I checked the seperator config file, and it looks ok to me. My MVS system is Tk4- fix level 7. Do I miss something? Thanks for help in advance! Regards Peter

[@peterjacob8871]

I circumvented the problem by adding Pages="(1,TIMEOUT=4)" in the config file. So there is something wrong in finding the end of job location. I will continue my investigations.

[@moshixmainframechannel]

You should use he MVS JES2 33 lines config profile. Sounds like you have a wrong config file

[@peterjacob8871]

in the HERCPRT directory is a txt2pdf.exe, which produces the mainframe type output (green/blue bar). Call it with TXT2PDF.exe -i input-file -o output-file.PDF -g. The result is a nice formatted output - for those of you, who want format simple text file ...

[@ddebevec]

Was curious, I thought you are running Linux, but HercPrt seems to be a windows app. How are you making it work? Thanks!

[@moshixmainframechannel]

Because I have a whole bunch of machines (usually virtual machines on servers). I run my MVS instances on Linux and then I have a windows instance (maybe even for as my desktop) connecting to the MVS instances over the network to receive the print output. Hercprt doesn’t care if it’s connecting to localhost or over Internet to the other side of the world. It’s all tcpip. Thanks for watching

[@rwh777]

Do you happen to know why the output differs depending on how you send the output to msgclass A, When you specify MSGCLASS=A on the job card, then all the sysout datasets in the job are concatenated and THEN surrounded by a jsep pages. But when you specify MSGCLASS=H, then view it in REVOUT and then print it with O A, you get EACH sysout dataset surrounded by jsep pages.

[@moshixmainframechannel]

I never noticed this. I will check and find out. Thanks

[@dietermontanez6576]

I think that is how the PRINTER1 is parametrized in SYS1.JES2PARM "SEP", I created my own printer with "NOSEP" instead. Around line 60...

[@lavaq9593]

I tried adding sockdev to the VM/370 config. It didn't work.; also I like using the MTS system, but I can't figure out how to print anything i.e. > even when you tested the ANSI COBOL run to see if anything can be compiled.

[@n7275]

Can you send Hercprt text files via things like netcat from linux?

[@moshixmainframechannel]

Yes you can.

[@n7275]

@@moshixmainframechannel so something like: cat file.txt | nc ip_of_hercprt_computer 1403 would work?

[@moshixmainframechannel]

@@n7275 indeed

[@n2185x]

If you want a font that is really close to the IBM line printer font, but don't want to shell out the cash for the line printer font, you can use OCR B Regular. This can be found at many font download sites throughout the net, if you don't already have it. The one I found has rounded ends for most of the letters, which is really what makes them look more like the line printer font than some of the other OCR B fonts I've seen. This Google search will get you this: www.google.com/search?q=%22ocr+b%22+download+fontpalace. I've not been able to find any paid variations of this font that have the rounded ends, nor can I find any copyright information in the font itself (but the version is "Altsys Fontographer 3.5 4/15/93", which suggests it's a rather old font) , so this variation is likely to be legitimately free (the site I got it from, fontpalace.com, claims to host only truly free fonts).

[@moshixmainframechannel]

Yes! Wow! That’s a truly great tip! I will share it with others in upcoming videos

[@n2185x]

Thanks. This font makes for a great terminal font, too, and I've switched over to it for most of my terminal instances. There's another font that one can use for terminals, too. If you like the look of the old 3270 characters, then check this one out: github.com/rbanffy/3270font It turns out that if you're using a desktop linux (particularly Ubuntu, which because it's Debian-based blows the RedHat-based distributions out of the water as regards package management), you can directly install the 3270 font via "apt install fonts-3270". You can then configure the terminal program to use the 3270 fonts as long as your terminal is capable of using Truetype fonts (some old terminal programs aren't).

[@davidwijnants9137]

This is where the Windows world has the advantage of superior tooling. But on Linux you can improvise like this: urxvt -T 'Zebigbox Hardcopy' -pixmap ~/Pictures/lineprinter.xpm -fg black -bg white -font "xft:DejaVu Sans Mono:style=Bold" -geometry 132x45 -e ssh zebigbox tail -n 500 -f log/hardcopy.log

[@moshixmainframechannel]

David, what does the urxvt command do?

[@davidwijnants9137]

urxvt launches a terminal session (rxvt with extra options). -pixmap changes the background to the specified image (green and white bars in my case). -fg changes the foreground colour from default white to black. -font selects a font that is reasonably close to IBM 1403. -geometry specifies 132 characters wide by 45 high. -e starts the command to run. In this case I'm tail-following the hardcopy console log on my BeagleBone Black. You can do the same with a printer log. It doesn't have nice print margins or feeder holes, but it's recognisable.

[@davidwijnants9137]

Sorry, I was afraid this might turn into a troll thread, hence my not wanting to "bite". By "fish", do you perhaps mean tilde (~)? That's a UNIX shell idiom for your home directory. But on Windows you have a much better solution in the way Moshix describes in this video. The urxvt is just a [poor] example of my improvising on Linux. If you really want to do it the Linux way (on Windows), then I suggest Moshix' earlier video (18th December) on installing the bash shell. I'm not sure how well urxvt runs in that environment. Hope this helps. David.

[@moshixmainframechannel]

+David Wijnants thanks !