Printing Garbage
Many of you know that publisher requires some 'extras' to get your document to a printer in a legible format. There are now printers that can handle the PDF format natively but the majority of printers need to have the PDf converted to either Postscript (PS) or Printer Control Language(PCL). We have recommended a couple of converters to help you out with this.
Ghostscript, offers both PS and PCL converters the other product we recommend is xpdf from foolabs and we have many of you using both products very successfully. In spite of their robustness many of you have expressed concern - 'it's another moving part in the whole document generation process' - 'and it's not owned by Oracle' - both fair comments and I can understand the concern - however we have faith in these solutions and will help you to use them.
For BIP Standlaone users there is some good news, we have now built our own Postscript libraries to convert from PDF to PS. Very easy to use when setting up your printers in the user inteface.
As you can see its simple to use and if you want to continue to use another converter thats simple too. There are some caveats and limitations:
This release of the PDF to PostScript converter has the following limitations:
Only PDF version 1.4 or earlier is supported. This is also the currently supported version of the Oracle BI Publisher PDF output.
CID fonts, which are used mainly to support languages with large sets of glyphs like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, are only supported when embedded in the PDF.
Transparent and half-tone renderings are not supported.
DeviceN color space is not supported.
Shading patterns are not fully supported.
Vertical writing is not supported.
Not forgetting you EBS and other apps users out there - this functionality will be coming to an application near you later this year (for EBS) and next year for others.













