[Issue Unconfirmed]
More specifically, there needs to be a discussion of whether 'monochrome'
ought to be listed by a CMY printers (it should) and how clients might
handle printers that have different combinations of 'auto-monochrome',
'monochrome' and 'process-monochrome'.
It could but I don't know that that gets us to where we want to be.
There are basically two levels to this issue. One is for the printer to
list its job option capabilities as completely and correctly as possible,
and another is how different clients interpret those capabilities and also
how their developers have chosen to expose, or not expose, those
capabilities to the user.
A Printer that has multiple marking agents could expose its single-color
modes in various ways:
"print-color-mode-supported" = 'monochrome'
"print-color-mode-supported" = 'monochrome', 'process-monochrome'
"print-color-mode-supported" = 'process-monochrome'
"print-color-mode-supported" = 'monochrome', 'process-monochrome',
'auto-monochrome'
Some clients might adopt a UX strategy to show all of these to the user as
separate options, but is that a good idea? Or should the client instead be
encouraged to show just some of them? Some clients might want to show
selectable options for all supported keywords, but might want to restrict
the list of options for CMY printers that don't support K. What should a
client do in this case? Look at "printer-supply"?
Other clients will show 1 selectable option for any of those cases above
and choose to send a keyword based on internal heuristics, to avoid forcing
the user to read and learn additional options.
Link: http://www.pwg.org/issues/135