What People Do With RPM
RPM is flexible enough that customers regularly use it in ways we did not design for. This page collects the jobs people actually ask about, each with the setup instructions and, where a customer has let us tell their story, what it looked like in production.
If your problem is not on this list, ask us. More than one entry below began as a customer wanting to know whether their idea was even possible.
Turn host output into PDF
The job we are asked to do most often. Plain text, SCS from an IBM host, PCL or PostScript arrives from your system and leaves as a PDF, with fonts, paper size and document metadata under your control. Text to PDF works in either edition; PCL, PostScript and the image formats are Elite only .
Setup: five ways to convert AS/400 files to PDF • creating PDFs • the PDF transform • PDF, TIFF and PCL
In production: a federal agency converts mainframe output to PDF and routes it by what is in the document.
Print one job on several colors of paper
One invoice, four departments, four paper colors — without changing the application that prints it. RPM sends the job to each tray in turn, so the sequence your printer produces matches the order the paper sits in.
Setup: printing copies of your job to multiple trays • triplicate printing
In production: Kelly Seed — pink for the sale, green for the warehouse picker, white for the delivery signature, yellow for the customer.
Print and keep a copy in one pass
The printer gets the paper and a folder gets the file, from the same job, with neither waiting on the other. Actions in RPM run independently, so nothing is lost if the printer is offline when the job arrives.
Setup: hard copy and soft copy in a single pass
Email the job to whoever should receive it
RPM can send the job as an email, either to a fixed address or to one it reads out of the print data itself, with the content as the body or as an attachment.
Setup: the email action
In production: an aircraft insurer emails invoices, reports and underwriting worksheets automatically.
Save a job to disk without printing it
One of the most requested things on this site. The job lands as a file in a folder you choose, named from data inside the job rather than with a sequence number, and no paper is used at all.
Setup: how to save your print job to a file without printing it • the archive action
In production: the Archdiocese of Chicago digitizes financial documents this way.
Hand the job to your own program
RPM can run a program with the print job as its input, building the command line from values it found in the data. This is the action behind most of the integrations people do not expect a print server to be capable of.
Setup: the filter action
In production: a customer pushes print data straight into a relational database — their system thinks it is printing.
Route a job by what is inside it Elite only
RPM can pull text out of the job — an account number, a department, an email address, a document name — and use it to decide where the job goes, so a single queue can serve jobs that need different destinations.
Setup: data extraction • dynamic job routing
In production: Cosmo Corporation gets the PDFs they want in both English and Chinese.
Print the same job on several printers at once
Send one job to many destinations, whether that is a bank of Windows printers or a split between two of them. Forwarding onward over LPR or port 9100 to other devices is Elite only .
Setup: printing to multiple printers • broadcast printing • splitting a stream between two printers
In production: a newsroom prints scripts to every printer that needs them.
Put a watermark or overlay under the job Elite only
A graphic or text watermark sits under the job so the text prints over it, with control over which pages get it and where it lands — including negative offsets that place it in the margin.
Setup: watermarks
Print from UNIX, Linux or a mainframe to a Windows printer
The original reason RPM exists. Your host sends a job the way it always has, over LPD, and it comes out on a Windows printer, on a shared printer, or in a folder on a Windows filesystem.
Setup: Linux • how to send print jobs to RPM • system setups
In production: The Stewart Organization reached Windows resources from a Linux environment without rebuilding either.
Find and reprint a job from last week
Every job RPM handles is in its database, so you can go back, look at what arrived, and print it again without asking the host to resend.
Setup: how to find past jobs
Print labels from a host application
Label stock, a host that only knows how to print, and no middleware in between.
Setup: printing labels from the AS/400
In production: low-cost label printing in healthcare.
Upload finished output to an FTP server Elite only
Processed jobs land on a remote server rather than a local disk or printer — a common pairing with PDF conversion. RPM keeps the connection alive between jobs rather than reconnecting for each one.
Setup: the FTP action
Control the font, margins and page layout
Specify the font, the margins, and lines per page or per inch, pick the paper size in the Windows printer setup, and let RPM handle the positioning. This is the part that makes text from a host look deliberate rather than accidental.
Setup: controlling font and page format • Windows print setup, step by step
Two more products cover jobs RPM does not. If your host sends IPDS, that is ExcelliPrint. If you need to send jobs from Windows to an LPD host or to many printers at once, that is INTELLIscribe.