Subject: Please clarify IBMFONT for TN5250 printing

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 17:58:05 -0700

Ref:  RFC-1205 "5250 Telnet Enhancements", Sec 8. Printer Enhancements

     I would be grateful if someone could clarify the range of allowed
     values for the IBMFONT parameter in TN5250 negotiation for printer
     sessions.

     RFC-1205 specifies IBMFONT as "us-ascii char(x)" which is a maximum of
     10 characters.  But the corresponding host command (CRT/CHGDEVPRT)
     defines the font parameter as accepting a 1- to 5-digit integer from a
     pre-defined list.  But most importantly, we've empirically found the
     AS/400 telnet server uses only the first three digits and discards the
     rest.  For example, if our client tries to negotiate a user-defined
     font such as IBMFONT 65535, the device description is created with
     FONT 655.

     Is the server's three-digit limit a permanent restriction?
     If so, please update the RFC to match.
     If not, kindly update the server to use all five digits sent.

     Many thanks for your help!

     Barry Hansen
     WRQ, Inc.
     [email-masked]

---

From: Jeffrey Stevens <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 1998 18:42:19 -0500

Barry,

Just to clarify, our Draft RFC is NOT RFC-1205.  It is currently not
assigned a number and goes by the name of "TN5250E" or "Telnet
Enhancements".  RFC 1205 was done by Paul Chmielewski and was formalized
back in 1991.  Our Draft RFC can be gotten from the link
http://www.ietf.org/ids.by.wg/tn3270e.html.

Telnet will pass the IBMFONT character string directly into the font
parameter for the create printer device program.  So, if you prompt on the
FONT parameter for the CRTDEVPRT command for 3812-1 *VRT type printers, you
will see the allowed range of values.  The relevant code in question will
pad this value with NULLs and only use it for the font, so there is no
point size support even though the CRTDEVPRT shows FONT as paired values of
font and point size.

As for the truncation you are reporting, we are still investigating -
thank you for bringing it to our attention.  We will re-post when we learn
more about what is occuring there, since the truncation is occurring
upstream from Telnet in another component.

--
J.S. (Jeffrey) Stevens      AS/400 TCP/IP          (Telnet/WSG/LPD)
Work:  [email-masked]        Personal:  [email-masked]