I would like to open your eyes for some of the many possibilities that you have for combining InterForm400 with various processes. Sometimes I am impressed when I hear, what kind of hard work InterForm400 is doing in some installations and I want to share this with you:
 

A shoe company is generating large PDF files with a description and even a picture of each shoe. For this they are using a special &&IMG command in the spooled file to directly include the pictures as JPG files from the IFS – without having the need to install the hundreds of pictures in InterForm400. They just copy them to the IFS and refer to the path in InterForm400.
 

Mainly banks and insurance companies combine InterForm400 with the InterWord400 module to have a high powered mail merge running on the System i, while being able to edit the letters in MS Word or a similar text editor. They are also using the OMR option in InterForm400 to put the printed pages into envelopes in an automated manner.
 

InterForm400 is used for creating up to date PDF files, which e.g. can be published on the web. InterForm400 is doing the job behind the scenes by merging a temporary spooled file with an overlay or overlay selector e.g. with the command APF3812/MRGSPLFPDF or via the PDF file naming definition (via Auto Forms Control).
 

Sometimes we read of companies sending out multiple letters to the same array of customer while claiming it is too expensive to coordinate these letters to save on stamps and envelopes. This is actually fairly easy (and inexpensive) to do with InterForm400s OSC (Output Schedule Control), which can merge numerous spooled files into one, sort them on e.g. customer number and then you can use that to create letters (or pdf files) containing pages from different spooled files. Customers are also using OSC to combine totally different documents into one e.g. for insurance policies. You merge the new combined spooled file with an overlay selector, so each page is merged with the matching overlay.
 

With the STRSCNATN (Start Screen Attention) command of InterForm400, you can build additional functionality into existing 3rd party 5250 applications. You use the ‘attention’ key (normally mapped to ‘Esc’) to call this function. It makes it possible to take some information from the current screen and call a program (or command) with this information as parameters. With this you can e.g. point the cursor to a specific line and/or position and InterForm400 can then read the position and grab information from this place to e.g. create a pdf file containing the joblog of that specific job (from WRKACTJOB).