How the ICU prints and plots charts

GDDM-PGF V2R1.3 Interactive Chart Utility

How the ICU prints and plots charts

GDDM-PGF V2R1.3 Interactive Chart Utility
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When you ask the ICU to print or plot a chart, it passes the request to GDDM and it is the GDDM printing and plotting support that is used.

GDDM creates the output and sends it to the printer or plotter. (The VM/CMS subsystem will not let GDDM send output to most printers, so it creates the output as a file for the user or another program to send. The GDDM-supplied program ADMOPUV will do this. You can set up GDDM so that this runs automatically.)

On the ICU Printer/Plotter Output panel, you type in a name of a printer or plotter. GDDM uses this name to discover which printer or plotter you want and how you want it to look on that device. Having discovered this, it then has to find out the sort of printer and plotter it is dealing with and send it the right sort of output. (Each type needs a different sort of output.)

GDDM gets this information from a list. This list either tells GDDM that the printer or plotter is directly attached (this means that GDDM can ask the plotter and discover for itself) or the list contains a description of the printer or plotter in the form of a device token. (A third possibility is that the list contains nothing. GDDM then assumes the device is a 3287 printer with a paper size of 132 columns by 80 rows.)

The list that GDDM uses is built each time it is used from a file created by the systems programmer or ICU user called a defaults file. This file must be right or else printing and plotting will not work properly. The information in the file is normally in the form of nicknames.

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