RPM First Character Forms Control (FCFC)

What it does

This transform is similar to the historical ASA transform used with Fortran print jobs in the early days of the Internet. This particular scheme is an IBM creation, and you can get more information by doing a web search on “first character forms control.”

Like ASA, in FCFC the first character of a line determines how the remainder of the line is formatted.

Setup

• ’ ’ means Space one (1) line (blank code)
• 0 means Space two (2) lines
• • means Space three (3) lines
• • means Suppress space (print on top of the previous line)
• 1 means Skip to channel 1 (Form Feed or New Page)
• 2 means Skip to channel 2
• 3 means Skip to channel 3
• 4 means Skip to channel 4
• 5 means Skip to channel 5
• 6 means Skip to channel 6
• 7 means Skip to channel 7
• 8 means Skip to channel 8
• 9 means Skip to channel 9
• A means Skip to channel 10
• B means Skip to channel 11
• C means Skip to channel 12

The setup dialog lets you select the channels for codes 2 through 9 plus A, B, and C. There are no codes before channel 2. The IBM documentation says that these codes are rarely used.

Examples

We worked with one of our resellers to incorporate this feature into RPM Remote Print Manager for a customer.