The Printer Working Group held a "virtual" face-to-face meeting via WebEx teleconferences on May 2-4, 2017. This event was held in collaboration with Linux Foundation OpenPrinting Workgroup. Sessions were presented by both organizations over the event's 3 days. Representatives from HP, Xerox, Lexmark, Apple, Canon, Oki, Artifex and Canonical attended the meetings. We discussed status of current projects and liaisons with other groups, and reviewed several drafts of in-progress specifications. Here is a summary of the proceedings.
In the PWG Plenary, we reviewed the state of the projects hosted on the PWG GitHub site.
We briefly covered the status of each working group, noting that the
Semantic Model working group is now in hibernation, and the Imaging
Device Security (IDS) working group will hold periodic meetings as part
of its new role to review and discuss issues implementing the new HCD
Protection Profile and other HCD standards. We discussed the PWG's
projects on Github. Finally, we
discussed our liaison relationships with Trusted Network Computing,
Mopria, ISO JTC1 and AMSC.
In the Linux OpenPrinting sessions on the first day, we learned about the current major issues affecting printing on Linux and other open source operating systems. In the OpenPrinting plenary, Ira McDonald discussed the state of Linux OpenPrinting. Mike Sweet reviewed the state of CUPS and discussed the PWG's ippsample project, which is derived from CUPS but is more purely based IPP, and doesn't have the CUPS legacy APIs or facilities such as PPDs. Aveek Basu discussed an upcoming Google Summer of Code project to implement a new Common Print Dialog. Till Kamppeter discussed the cups-filters project's effort to maintain facilities no longer supported by the CUPS project, to continue support for legacy driver systems and older devices.
On the third day, Michael Vrhel reviewed the current state of
Ghostscript and MuPDF, and examined some recent enhancements to those
systems. Following that, a "PWG / OpenPrinting Collaborative Projects
Discussion" was held, opening the floor to suggestions for areas in
which the PWG and OpenPrinting might collaborate. Finally, we discussed
the desire to have a physical (non-virtual) PWG / OpenPrinting summit in
2018.
In the Imaging Device Security Workgroup session on the morning of the second day, Alan Sukert reviewed an update to the IDS WG charter, to better cover its current mission to review and discuss issues implementing the new HCD Protection Profile and other HCD standards. Alan and Brian Smithson then led a discussion reviewing the results of the latest MFP TC Meeting, which was held the week before.
Future meetings will be announced on the ids mailing list.
In the Semantic Model Workgroup session, Bill Wagner discussed
the workgroup's status, specifically how the workgroup will be put into a
state of "hibernation", since its purpose of maintaining a semantic
model distinct from IPP is no longer desired by the PWG members. He
reviewed the remaining action items that need to be accomplished before
the workgroup actually enters hibernation, including publishing the
latest "Mapping CIP4 JDF to PWG Print Job Ticket v1.0 (JDFMAP)" draft as
a "Best Practices" whitepaper rather than a candidate standard, which
removes the need for prototyping and will allow the document to be
finalized in a reasonable amount of time. It was agreed that the Last
Call and Call for Objections steps will be handled via email and don't
require further meetings.
All future meetings of the Semantic Model workgroup were cancelled until such time as the workgroup emerged from hibernation.
In the Internet Printing Protocol Workgroup session, Ira McDonald presented the latest draft of the IPP System Service specification. Mike Sweet presented the latest draft of the "PWG 3D Print Job Ticket and Associated Capabilities v1.0 (PJT3D)" specification. The workgroup agreed that the latter document was stable enough to proceed with PWG Last Call and PWG Formal Vote. Smith Kennedy presented an updated draft of his "IPP Get-User-Printer-Attributes Operation" whitepaper, and reviewed a set of sequence diagrams that intended to articulate the set of HTTP actions that occur in the process of performing HTTP authentication of various types. His "IPP Presets" whitepaper was saved for the next IPP WG teleconference.
The next IPP Workgroup conference calls are May 11, 2017 and May 25, 2017. Meeting details can be found on the IPP Workgroup page. Please subscribe to the ipp mailing list for details.
The PWG will hold its next face-to-face meeting August 8-9, 2017. A location (virtual vs. physical) for the meeting hasn't been chosen yet.