[printing-discuss] IJS Protocol for bitblts

[Mark Hamzy]

Hello,

  I think that the protocol should be generalized in the case of raster
data transfer.  This will allow other applications and rendering engines
to talk to printer drivers.

  Right now, there are 3 keys that control the format of the
raster data:  NumChan, BitsPerSample, and ColorSpace.  I assume that the
size of the bitmap will be exactly the size of the printable page.

  There should be two modes of bitmap transfer.  The first mode should be
a series of banded bitmaps that are in the color space format that the
printer driver wants.  It should be sequential bands of the page.  It
could be either top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top.  It can also have an
optimization of not sending the starting and trailing white-space bands.

  The second mode should be a number of one or more bitmaps.  Each bitmap
will have it's size, color depth, and position on the page.  I have
written some code that can take the second mode and translate to the
first mode.  It is freely available in the omni driver.

  What do you all think?

Mark

Take a look at the Linux Omni printer driver at
http://www.ibm.com/linux/ltc/projects/omni/