Printing with SAS

Universal Printing

Universal Printing is a printing system that provides both interactive and batch printing capabilities to SAS applications and procedures on all the operating environments that are supported by SAS.

When Universal Printing is ON, SAS routes all printing through Universal Printing services. All Universal Printing features are controlled by system options, thereby enabling you to control many print features even in batch mode. For more information on these system options, see System Options That Control Universal Printing.

Note: Before the introduction of Universal Printing, SAS supported a utility for print jobs known as Forms. Forms printing is still available if you select File Print Setup from the menu, then check the Use Forms check box. This turns off Universal Printing menus and functionality. For more information, see Examples of Specifying Fonts and Printing International Characters. [cautionend]

Turning Universal Printing On and Off

Universal Printing is available on all operating environments that SAS supports. By default, Universal Printing is turned ON on all operating environments except Windows.

The UNIVERSALPRINT system option must be set for Universal Printing to be ON and used by SAS. This option can be set only in the SAS configuration file or at start up. You cannot turn Universal Printing menus on or off after start up.

Note: When you use the PRINTERPATH= system option to specify a printer, the print job is controlled by Universal Printing. [cautionend]

Operating Environment Information: In the Windows operating environment, you must set the UNIVERSALPRINT system option in order to use Universal Printing. You must also set the UPRINTMENUSWITCH system option to use the Universal Printing windows. To use Universal Printing, include the following system options when starting SAS:

-uprint -uprintmenuswitch

[cautionend]

Universal Printing Output Formats and Printers

Types of Output Formats

In addition to sending print jobs to a printer, you can also direct output to external files that are widely recognized by different types of printers and print viewing software programs. You can use Universal Printing to produce the following commonly recognized file types.

Available Print Output Formats
Type	Full Name	Description
GIF	Graphics Interchange Format	A simple raster image format designed for the online transmission and interchange of graphic data. The format is widely used to display images on the World Wide Web.
PCL	Printer Control Language	Developed by Hewlett-Packard as a language that applications use to control a wide range of printer features across a number of printing devices. Universal Printing currently supports PCL5, PCL5e, and PCL5c levels of the language.
PDF	Portable Document Format	A file format developed by Adobe Systems for viewing and printing a formatted document. To view a file in PDF format, you need Adobe Reader, a free application distributed by Adobe Systems. Note: Adobe Acrobat is not required to produce PDF files with Universal Printing.
PNG	Portable Network Graphics	A raster image format that was designed as a replacement for the older simple GIF format and the more complex TIFF format. As with GIF, one of the major uses of PNG is to display images on the World Wide Web. PNG has four major advantages over GIF on the Web: gamma correction, two-dimensional interlacing, variable transparency (alpha channel), and more than 256 colors.
PS	PostScript	A page description language also developed by Adobe Systems. PostScript is primarily a language for printing documents on laser printers, but it can be adapted to produce images on other types of devices.
SVG	Scalable Vector Graphics	A language for describing two-dimensional graphics and graphical applications in XML.

You can access the list of available printers from either the Print dialog box or the SAS Registry path CORE\PRINTING\PRINTERS.

Universal Printing and ODS

The ODS PRINTER destination can use Universal Printing whether the UNIVERSALPRINT system option is on or off. The PRINTER destinations used by the ODS PRINTER statement are described in SAS Output Delivery System: User's Guide.

The Output Delivery System (ODS) uses Universal Printing for the following ODS statements.

ODS Destinations That Use the Universal Printing Interface
ODS PRINTER Destination	Description
ODS PRINTER PRINTER= option	Uses the selected printer.
ODS PDF statement	Uses Universal Printing's PDF printer.
ODS PS statement	Uses Universal Printing's PostScript Level 1 printer.
ODS PCL statement	Uses Universal Printing's PCL5 printer.

Operating Environment Information: In the Windows operating environment, the ODS PRINTER destination uses the Windows system printers unless SAS is started with the UNIVERSALPRINT system option, or when you specify a printer with the PRINTERPATH= system option. If Universal Printing is enabled in Windows, SAS overrides the use of the Windows system printer and causes ODS to use Universal Printing. [cautionend]

For more information on ODS, see SAS Output Delivery System: User's Guide.

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