Expert: Concise Systems/Laird Scranton - 2/19/2002

Question
We moved from our old AS400 box to the iSeries box.
Most reports printed are OK except for one particular report.
Expected output is
 < address 1 .... >
 < address 2 .... >
 < address 3 .... >

And, this is the report output,
 < address 1 .... >
 <               >
 < address 2 .... >
There seems to be an additional printer control code.  Developers indicate they didnt change any codes.
IBM support is non commital on what is wrong.
Suspect they might have not setup the FCFC option correctly but how do i confirm this?  

Answer
There are a lot of possibilities here - enough that you probably need a programmer on site to solve it.  It's behaving like printed output sent to a PC printer where the text to be printed exceeds the maximum width of the line - for example, like an attempt to print in column 81 of an 80 column line.  That might happen if the report was designed for, say, 15 characters per inch, but is printing at 10 characters per inch.  That might come from a recompiled printer file or an override printer file statement that used to execute but is not executing now, maybe because the printer device name is different. It could also be a printer emulation problem or a difference in how the iSeries handles the emulation, where a control code sent to the printer is being interpreted as a line feed or a tab.

If it were me, I would start by recompiling the programs to a test library to see if the problem goes away.  Migrated objects do not always behave the same as objects compiled on the new system.  Then I would look at any obvious overrides in the CL program.  Then I would start to look at what printer the device is emulating.