Chapter 17: Printing with SAS

Introduction to Universal Printing

What Is 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.

Note: Prior to 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

from the menu, then check the Use Forms check box. This turns off Universal Printing menus and functionality. For more information, see 'Forms Printing' on page 279.

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 (alias UPRINT) 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 startup. You cannot turn Universal Printing menus on or off after startup.

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

Operating Environment Information: In the Windows operating environment, you must set an additional system option, UPRINTMENUSWITCH, in order to access the Universal Printing user interface. You must also set UPRINTMENUSWITCH, in order to configure all menus in SAS to use the Universal Printing windows. To do this, include

 -uprint -uprintmenuswitch 

in the string that you use to invoke SAS under Windows.

What Type of Print Output Formats Are Available from Universal Printing?

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:

Table 17.1: Available Print Output Formats

Type	Full Name	Description
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 Acrobat Reader, a free application distributed by Adobe Systems.
Optimized PDF	Optimized Portable Document Format	A compressed PDF file format developed by Adobe Systems.
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 adaptedto produce images on other types of devices.

Universal Printing and ODS

The ODS PRINTER destination uses Universal Printing whether the UNIVERSALPRINT 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:

Table 17.2: ODS Destinations that make use of the Universal Printing interface

ODS PRINTER Destination	Description
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 will use the Windows system printers unless SAS was started with the UNIVERSALPRINT option, or when you specify a printer with the PRINTERPATH option. If Universal Printing is enabled in Windows, SAS will override the use of the Windows system printer and cause ODS to use Universal Printing.

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