Printing is probably the most complicated and confusing area within A-Shell. There are a couple of reasons for this.

• The print spooling facilities and capabilities vary widely among the platforms supported by A-Shell.

• Network environments impose another layer of configuration complexity beyond what you may have been used to with AMOS.

Perhaps we could have approached this problem by developing an emulation of the AMOS spooler for each platform. However, this would have conflicted with one of the underlying design philosophies of A-Shell, which is to allow your application to coexist with other applications on a given platform, sharing common operating system facilities as appropriate. Therefore, since virtually all Windows applications spool reports via the Print Manager, it makes sense that A-Shell does too. UNIX applications typically use one of the spoolers provided by the operating system, so again, A-Shell does the same.

This approach may make it easier for a system administrator to integrate and manage A-Shell in an existing environment, but it does require that the administrator or installer create printer configuration files which define the interface between the logical printer names used within the AMOS / A-Shell applications, and the corresponding real printers available in the physical establishment. The following sections describe this in detail.