My company has created a proprietary file format for use with our industry. Currently I am having an issue with converting a FM file, within DOS, to the print driver that we have also created. All the commands that are generally used within DOS to get it to work is not working and I am unsure as to what to do next.
We are using FM 7.1 to create the text files for charts that is eventually added to one single file. The print format is postscript and it is all done via command line within DOS.
So if I'm correct you are controlling the process by command lines? Like e.g. DZbatcher from Miramo?
And the text files you are referring to are thus PostScript printer files. Are you then extracting the chart information from these (second guessing that there are some charts in the FM files).
Why would you create your own Printer driver? To my knowledge there are good reliable PS printer drivers available everywhere. Start by using Adobe's own and then a ton of emulated almost as good 8smoetimes a bit better) drivers from different vendors.
The core is (I believe) to create a PS file that conforms to the PostSript code. Line by line. Any discrepancy or lack of compatibility to the PS code will lead to problems.
A wise man once told me that it is no problem to create a PS driver, since you can get all the information from Adobe. The problem is to mimic the errors inside the PS code. Since these are not very well documented by Adobe (goes without saying I guess). A good example is the Brother PS drivers (some years ago now). Brother had this notion that Adobe didn't know how to ... (ot at least they could do better at Brother), and that a font is something that is not very important. So they thought is was OK to print a Bookman font, even though the user selected Times. Oops. Also that same driver was not able to print white on a black background on their own PS printers, since they also emulated HPGL in the same printer.
Regarding "The print format is postscript and it is all done via command line within DOS."
Oof!
After you sort out your immediate production problems and get a bit of breathing space, you might want to take a look at the free Cygwin "Linux-like environment for Windows".
http://cygwin.com/
You may well be delighted with Cygwin's support for BASH scripting as well as Cygwin's Postscript and PDF manipulation command-line utilities...
Why would you create your own Printer driver? To my knowledge there are good reliable PS printer drivers available everywhere.
-Thomas Bro
We have a file format that we created that is used for a specific product. In order to properly use the files in the manner we use them, the need for a print driver was there. None was offered as COTS so we had to create it ourselves.
My only issue is getting the command to work properly in DOS to take the .fm file and print it to the driver itself so the driver can output the desired format for another use. Without this functionality, it will complicate things to a degree we wish to avoid if at all possible. If there is no solution that can be found using DOS then we will have to do something else.
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