Tom,
Thanks, yes I had forgotten about querying the document attributes.
We are thinking about these problems because there seems to be a lot more
interest now in submitting relatively complex jobs to commercial printers on
the Internet, or to a print room in a company, and IPP seems well suited to
this.
We had thought about modifying attributes for page ranges as well, but it
turns out that is very difficult to define what is going to happen when an
attribute is modified. I could define a duplex letter job and then say that
page 5 is ledger because I want a fold out spreadsheet in a report. The
system then has to work out what to do with page 6, print it on the back of
the ledger sheet? print it on the next A4 side? Perhaps it is formatted to
be placed on the left side of an open book, and the system ought to skip a
page.
There are also production problems, because odd sheets might have to printed
on another printer, or the operator might have to change the stock on a
tray.
It turns ought that by using documents it is much easier to specify exactly
what you want, and much easier to handle the job.
Perhaps the finishing could vary per document, the present set of attributes
are good enough for V1, but more complex jobs could require more choices for
finishing.
Anthony Porter
-----Original Message-----
From: Hastings, Tom N [mailto:hastings at cp10.es.xerox.com]
Sent: 14 September 1999 23:25
To: anthony.porter at computer.org; ipp at pwg.org
Subject: RE: IPP> Problem specifying multimedia jobs in IPP 1.1
Anthony,
You are correct that current IPP does not provide the mechanisms you desire
to be able to specify different media for different documents in a job.
We agreed during the IPPv1 work that we wouldn't attempt to solve problem of
allowing a client to submit Job Template attributes on a per-document basis,
mainly because we couldn't come up with a good simple way for the client to
query a job and get back the per-document attributes. The query response
just seemed too complicated for v1. However, we have listed as future work
for IPP adding per-document attributes. See the charter discussion in the
email and that will be discussed next week at the IPP WG meeting in Denver.
So you example is a good requirement for the per-document extension.
What other requirements are there for finer control of application of Job
Template attributes to the job or pieces of it?
How about the client being able to supply a Job Template attribute for a
range of pages in a document?
Tom
-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Porter [mailto:anthony.porter at computer.org]
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 1999 01:17
To: ipp at pwg.org
Subject: IPP> Problem specifying multimedia jobs in IPP 1.1
I am having some trouble specifying multimedia jobs in IPP. One example
would be a small saddle-stitch brochure, where the outside is printed on
heavy card stock to make a cover.
I could submit such a job as two documents. One A4 document for the cover,
and another A5 document for the internal pages. I could then specify
finishing=saddle-stitch and
multiple-document-handling=single-document-new-sheet and media=iso-A5. All
this specifies that the two documents should be imposed as an A5
saddle-stitch document on A4 sheets and bound together.
The only thing I cannot do is to specify that the first document, the cover,
ought to be printed on heavier stock.
Section 4.2.6 of the MOD states:
'6' 'cover': This value is specified when it is desired to select
a non-printed (or pre-printed) cover for the document.
This does not supplant the specification of a printed
cover (on cover stock medium) by the document itself.
This implies that a document can specify a medium, but I don't see how to do
this. It looks as if the Send-Document request ought to use more of the job
attributes. It has document-name, document-format, compression and a couple
of others. It seems that each document within a job ought to be able to
specify sides, number-up, orientation-requested, media, printer-resolution
and print-quality as well. If one of these attributes are not specified for
a document, then the value specified for the job would apply.
In the example above, the cover should be printed with
sides=duplex-short-edge orientation-requested=landscape because it is an A4
sheet and the colors bleed all the way across. The contents should be
printed with sides=duplex-long-edge orientation-requested=portrait because
they are A5 portrait size.
A similar problem occurs when printing letters and envelopes for a mail
shot. I could submit a document with 500 addresses and a document with 500
corresponding letters and specify
multiple-document-handling=single-document-new-sheet. I don't have a way of
specifying that the first document should be printed on envelopes and the
second on letter stock. There is also the same problem with orientation and
duplex settings.
What do the rest of you think of this? Perhaps what I want to do is
possible and I have just not read the spec carefully enough, but it looks as
if more document attributes would be useful, even for quite simple printers.
Anthony Porter