Cannot print Landscape report to PCL printer - Solved

Question

Has anyone been able to print a landscape BIP PDF to a PCL printer?
I am on EBS 11.5.10.2, with BIP 5.6.3, and PASTA 3.0.4.
The first report template I tried creating (Discrete Job Pick List Report) in XML Publisher / BIP happens to have a landscape layout, 11 inches wide by 8.5 inches high.
The report is created successfully as a PDF, but I can't get that PDF to print successfully on my PCL printers - the output is truncated on the right. It looks like it is trying to print the landscape report on portrait paper.
Not sure if that makes sense. It is not rotating the report contents to fit on the paper.
I configured PASTA as instructed in MetaLink:
Note 338990.1 - How To Print XML Publisher PDF Reports Via The Concurrent Manager,
Note 356501.1 - How to Setup Pasta Quickly and Effectively, and
Note 365111.1 - How to Setup Pasta for PCL Base Printers
I submitted a TAR/SR on this and they referred me to
Note 421358.1 - Custom Landscape Reports In PDF Format Print in Portrain Orientation
And basically told me what I was trying to do was not normal, and that I should get a PostScript printer. That's not an option, since all of our printers do PCL, but not all of them do PS.
Has anyone been able to achieve this?
Thanks,
Steve
Edited by: user650442 on Oct 8, 2008 11:55 AM
(changed original subject to add 'Solved')

Answer 1

The SR conversation on this topic ended with "EBS does not have any seeded code or driver that can covert a PDF file to PCL, however. If such a third party tools exists, it can be placed (called) within the preprocessing section of the pasta_pdf.cfg configuration file." The documentation recommends "acroread", but I think this is an obsolete utility, plus it doesn't do PCL.
I could not find a third party tool to convert to PCL in the preprocess section of PASTA, while doing landscape, but I did find a third party tool that can replace the "ntPrintCommand" part of PASTA. It is called "GSPRINT", and it is part of GSview. I am on a Windows platform, so this is perfect for me, since it works with the Windows printer drivers at a bitmap level, and no PCL or PostScript conversion or preprocessing is necessary on my part. It takes the PDF as input directly, and prints it.
Here is the essence of my pasta.cfg file now (named pasta_gsprint_landscape.cfg)
  outputFormat=text
  ntPrintCommand=c:\utils\gs\gsview\gsprint.exe -printer "{printername}" -landscapeThe outputFormat=text so that PASTA will not do anything except preprocess and print. I took out the preprocess, so all it does is print using gsprint.
Since this makes pasta pretty much just overhead, I'm going to look into the option of running gsprint directly and taking pasta out of the loop completely.