PSF resident font utility—APSRMARK

Host-font resources—code pages and character sets—can reside in a printer. To identify such resources to PSF as potentially printer-resident, use the APSRMARK utility, which is provided by PSF.

APSRMARK is a batch program started with control statements. You can use it to do these:

• Mark all or individual host code pages and character sets of partitioned data sets, so that PSF will know that there is a printer-resident version of the resource.
• Report the marking status of all or individual members of partitioned data sets.
• Report the marking status of a font resource found in a sequential file that can be subsequently moved into a font library.

Fonts that have been updated by APSRMARK are called marked fonts. When you mark a font, you are essentially updating certain structured fields. For example, when you mark a code page, you are updating the Begin Code Page structured field.

To mark a font, you provide JCL statements to run the APSRMARK utility and identify fonts as either PUBLIC or PRIVATE. If the version of the font stored in the PSF resource libraries is marked PRIVATE, PSF downloads the font to the printer. A font stored in a PSF resource library must be marked PUBLIC so that the equivalent printer-resident font can be used; this prevents PSF from downloading the font to the printer. If a font is not marked, it is treated as if it were marked PRIVATE. To prevent unnecessary downloading of fonts, mark PUBLIC any font that has an equivalent printer-resident font. Some fonts in the AFP Font Collection, Infoprint Fonts, z/OS® Font Collection, and 4028 Font Metrics are already marked PUBLIC. For more information about marking the fonts, see Syntax of APSRMARK control statements and APSRMARK control statement parameters for resident fonts.

If someone updates a code page or character set on the host that was marked PUBLIC, you should run APSRMARK to change the marking of the host resources—for example, by entering new date and time values. Otherwise, the change will not be reflected in the resources selected for printing a file. This is especially important when a resource is copied from a system library and modified for use in a private library. Unless you have run APSRMARK on the modified resource, you might use the old resource by mistake.