No subject

printers are likely to look like Postscript printers, assuming that
Ghostscript is the standard middleware for all devices.

Obviously for raw files this is not an issue.  This is also somewhat
specific to modern inkjets; laser printers and older-style impact
printers have less variation in this regard.  However, my point is
that cutting along vendor (or language) lines may not be the most
useful thing from the user (or application) point of view.

   Job Properties
   --------------

   Drivers should support a set of core properties.  For example, at a
   minimum,
   a driver should support (note: this is only a sample):
      form
...

   For the core properties, a driver should support a set of standardized
   selections.  This will help in moving jobs between different printer
   drivers that support a printer.  For example:

How do we handle printers that happily handle arbitrary paper sizes?
Epson inkjet printers (I keep coming back to them because I understand
them best) don't particularly care what the size of the paper is, as
long as it's within bounds (about 8.7x1200 inches for the 870, for
example).  And there are a number of printers that support roll feed
paper, where this is actually of quite significant use.

Perhaps in this case the form is "4 inch roll feed paper", with the
vertical dimension specified in some other way, or "custom", with both
dimensions specified in some other way.  That's what Gimp-print does.

I think we also need to handle constraints in a more general fashion.
Some printers may have different margins depending upon the resolution
(or resolution plus other quality information) selected, for example.
Most Epson printers can print closer to the top and bottom edges of
the paper if a soft weave mode is chosen than if firmware microweave
is.

   Job Control
   -----------

    - Start a job.
    - Start a page.
    - End a page.
    - Optionally change the properties for the next page.
    - End a job.
    - Abort a job.
      NOTE: I think that it is easier to abort a print job rather than
	    aborting a print page.  How do you recover and still keep
	    printing new pages?

It seems like a weird concept to me.  With on-the-fly output
generation, this can be done with most inkjets, but it still feels
very strange to me.  With laser printers, this doesn't make a whole lot
of sense at all, and even I have difficulty envisioning a situation
where this would be useful.  In any event, aborting a page is
something I think we should defer.

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rlk at alum.mit.edu>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gimp Print/stp --  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton