Xerox 96MX - Manual (Page 162)

SPECIFYING INPUT PARAMETERS
4-70 XEROX DOCUPRINT 96/DOCUPRINT 96MX LPS PDL REFERENCE
Offline mode
For offline operations, the input medium to the printing system is
magnetic tape, which may be recorded in one of a variety of standard
vendor formats. As a programmer, you define the tape input
deblocking and record format parameters that reduce physical tape
blocks first to logical records, then to print lines. Special processing
commands can also be selected that facilitate report processing by
providing for logical functions to be performed on the input data
described later in this chapter.
Before selecting the PDL commands that are to describe a specific
job tape, certain tape structure concepts must be understood. These
concepts, discussed in this chapter, enable the PDL programmer to
define job tape characteristics such as host format, block/record
structure, tape translation code, packed data formats, and several
other parameters.
Host computer tape formats
The printing system processes input tapes produced by those
standard hosts listed in the “Host system JDLs on the system
software tape” section in appendix D, “Offline specifications,” of this
manual. A specific input tape is selected by the HOST parameter of
the VOLUME command. The format of each tape is described in the
Xerox LPS Tape Formats Manual.
Tape codes
Tape codes recognized by the printing system are EBCDIC, ASCII,
and several versions of BCD. If these codes are not sufficient for a
particular tape, the user may create a new code translation table or
modify (customize) an existing code translation table. Tables
showing the correspondence between standard recording codes and
printed characters are contained in appendix C, “Character code
assignment tables.” Within a JDL, tape codes are selected by the
CODE parameter of the VOLUME command.