Merging Data on VMS to produce MS Windows Word documents?

[Brian Chiha]

Our VMS Alpha system uses Mass 11 Word processing to take data and merge with a document template to produce letters. Mass 11 is old and unsupported.

Is there a way where VMS can communicate with MS Windows to start up MS Word and merge data with a document template?

Is there a PDF writer which can be installed on VMS?

We don't have a problem with sharing data with our NT server as we use Advanced Server.

Does anyone do something similar to generate letters from data on VMS using third party software?

Thanks
Brian

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

You could use Ghostscript, which is a freeware tool that can produce a PDF.

http://vmsone.com/~ovmsfreeware/ovmsfwv6/disk1/ghostscript-v0811/

Wim

[Karl Rohwedder]

There are several tools available to produce PDF files on VMS, e.g. TXT2PDF from www.sanface.com.
A tool to produce MS-Word document is unknown to me, sorry.

mfg Kalle

[Bojan Nemec]

Brian,

VMS can communicate with MS Windows with Advanced Server a second posibility is to install Pathworks 32 DECnet support on a Windows system. If you install the FAL listener on the PC, you can copy files direct from the VMS with the COPY command:

$ COPY file pc"username password"::c:[mydir.subdir]

Another posibility is to use the smbclient which is part of samba.

All this posibilities gives you file transfer but no posibility to run a program on Windows. So you must write (or find) a program on yours Windows system that periodicaly check the contents of a predefined directory and, if something new comes, runs a program.
This is not the best solution (I tend not to use it). Another solution is to write a network service so you can post a message to it and start the program.

On VMS you can use Apache FOP (Formatting Objects Processor) http://xml.apache.org/fop/index.html

to produce a PDF (or PCL or PostScript file). There is no VMS specific installation, but you can get the current distribution and write a FOP.COM command procedure looking at the fop.sh and fop.bat procedures in the bin directory of the distribution.

Bojan

[Kris Clippeleyr]

Brian,

For generating PDF on VMS, you might have a look at PDFLib at:
http://www.pdflib.com/products/pdflib/download-source.html
There is a PDFLib Lite version that is free and has been ported to VMS, see:
http://dutsm43.stm.tudelft.nl/openvms/software2.html

Regards,
Kris (aka Qkcl)

[Michelle Popejoy]

Brian,

I have a customer that has some combination of .com's, .vbs's and .psl's that will launch MS Word (or Notepad) from within their VMS application to edit a particular file. If you think it might be helpful I can dig into it deeper and see if I can strip it down to generic usage. As you may guess, Advanced Server (or Samba) may be a necessary component, as might Apache.

Just let me know.

-Michelle

[Steve Nimr]

Years ago I used to use a WordPerfect version for VMS. Nice thing about it was when you transfer the documents to a pc running WordPerfect it read them fine no additional conversion steps were needed.

[Michelle Popejoy]

WordPerfect is unsupported on VMS, but still runs fine (through 7.3-2 anyway). :-)

[John Abbott_2]

Another twist at doing things...

might be worth looking at ANTIWORD on the VMS V7 freeware set. "ANTIWORD,Miscellaneous, a MS Word document file reader/converter."

It says it can read MS docs and output them as plain text or PS format.

Worth a browse...
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/freeware/freeware70/

I've also previously used Word Perfect as mentioned above.

[Chris Barratt]

We replaced our MAss11 usage a few years ago with WORD. In our case, documents were created with merged data and then text was added to the document by typists.

To do it, I believe we re-wrote the application's front-end in windows, called WORD and used some feature inside word to enable us to merge the data in from our VMS based databases.

I don't know the details, but I suspect if you looked into the programming abilities/interfaces of WORD, you would work it out. If I remember correctly, we were able to call a .DLL from a WORD interface and the .DLL pulled the data back from the VMS database (in our case Rdb).