Whoaaa...
I think we are once again forgetting the intent and purpose of this standard and
attempting to make it all things for all people (or drivers or whatever.)
The original purpose of this standard was to create a list of media NAMES that
would easily be parsed and the relevant information presented to the user. So
when the printer told the system it had:
na-letter.8500-11000
the system could tell the user there was
Letter (8.5 X 11)
available.
Or, if was a CAD application, it would know that the user would want to see that
presented as
A Size (8.5 X 11)
because the CAD application has a TABLE that matched the na-letter.8500-11000 to
a name its users preferred called "A Size"
A list of standarized names is simply that.... a list. It helps us printer
geeks know what the media is and translate it for the user to whatever format
the user expects. (I seriously doubt is any "normal" user would want to know
that the media loaded was:
tw-letter.12240-15840
(assumimg tw to be the abbreviation of twips))
We could just have easily standardized the names to not include the dimensions
but we chose to standardize the name to include the natural and normal units and
dimensions that piece of media is know by (to most people.) Conversions to
other units are OUTSIDE the scope of this standard and are to be handled
internally by any application using the NAMES. Remember, it is only a NAME.
Your NAME doesn't include information that completely describes you.... it is
simple a short-hand way of talking about a complete person. That is all this
is. Sorry if is doesn't provided infinite amounts of information or an infinite
number of ways of encoding the same information but it is just a NAME.
Harry and others are of course free to create an XML encoding that COMPLETELY
describes EVERY characterisic of media (and I do mean every) but this standard
was not intended to do that.
**********************************************
* Don Wright don at lexmark.com *
* Chair, Printer Working Group *
* Chair, IEEE MSC *
* *
* Director, Alliances & Standards *
* Lexmark International *
* 740 New Circle Rd *
* Lexington, Ky 40550 *
* 859-825-4808 (phone) 603-963-8352 (fax) *
**********************************************