Blog dedicated to Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite) Technology; covers Apps Architecture, Administration and third party bolt-ons to Apps

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Pasta printing

We had adventures with setting up pasta today when we were called to check an issue logged where an instance was unable to print reports to a new Xerox printer. These were the steps to diagnose and finally solve the issue:

1. Check if printer is installed on unix
2. Print a plain text file to the printer with the command: lp -c filename.txt -d printername
3. Using ghostscript pdf2ps convert a pdf file into ps
4. Set environment variable PRINTER on unix: PRINTER=myprinter;export PRINTER
5. Send the ps file to printer through lp -c filename.ps 
6. Check Pasta configuration in E-Business Suite

Pasta is a post-processing printing tool used in Apps. The term post-processing is used because the Pasta program is called after the concurrent processing server has completed processing the request and has generated an output file. The Pasta executable is FNDPSTAX. It is invoked via the Apps printer driver ONLY if a printed copy has been requested. At the present moment, the latest available version is 3.0.4 (patch 3325651). You'll get the latest version when you apply the latest ATG rollup patch. Typing at the Unix command line FNDPSTAX –v will provide the version.

E-Business Suite (EBS) is seeded with the printer type '--PASTA Universal Printer Type'. It can be associated with a Postscript printer and it’s ready for use with minimal changes or modifications to $FND_TOP/resource/pasta_printername.cfg

Pasta is required for EBS instances installed with the Unicode (UTF8) character set. On a UTF8 instance, output files (reports) are created with the UTF8 character set. Unicode UTF8 is a relatively new character set and many existing printers do not support the Unicode character set. Therefore, Pasta is used to convert text output files to the Postscript format (an image) or to an alternate character set, which the printer supports.

If you plan to print in Chinese, Japanese or Korean from your E-Business Suite instance, PASTA is the only way to do it.

Some metalink notes to help you in configuring PASTA:

Note 356501.1 - How to Setup Pasta Quickly and Effectively
Note 365111.1 - How to Setup Pasta for Non-Postscript Ready Printers
Note 189708.1 - Oracle Reports 6i Setup Guide for Oracle Applications 11i
Note 240864.1 - Activating and Configuring IX Library
Note 409458.1 - Understanding and Implementing direct printing of PDF using Ghostscript
Note 338990.1 - How To Print XML Publisher PDF Reports Via The Concurrent Manager?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello! My name is Helen and I'm trying to print Japanese carachters from EBS. My question is :
I can sucessfuly pirnt by FNDPSTAX commmand from O/S on the Application server ( the same parameters as a Oracle Pasta Drivers). But when I print from EBS FNDPSTAX command in Oracle Driver can't convert text file to Postsript. Sometimes printer even starts working , but nothing come out on the printer. Sometimes even that doesn't happen. The same behaivoiry when I try to reprint/republish report. Interesting observation: when I manualy replace output file to postscipt file ( it was some other file with Japanese carachters) - print from EBS comes out fine. Basen on this fact I assume that FNDPSTAX in the Oracle Driver by some reason doesn't know how to convert text file to ps , that it supprose to do as a first step if input file is not ps. Igor, really appreshate your help.PASTA is absolutly new for me! Thans very much in advance Helen

George said...

How can one when printing cheques from the EBS program format paymment instuctions ensure the cheques printing onto A4 paper is alligned currently it misprint everything using PASTA universal with the style pdf publisher the format is pdf