Hi PWG folks, Wednesday (16 April 1997)
The client software team I work with here at Xerox has recently been
meeting with some of our colleagues from Fuji Xerox (Japan). They noted
that the following original Printer MIB v1 (RFC 1759) text is STILL
present in 'draft-ietf-printmib-mib-info-01.txt' in section 2.2.1
'General Printer':
"Localization is only performed on those strings in the MIB that
are explicitly marked as being localized. All other character
strings are returned in ASCII."
Fortunately the Printer MIB specified the 'non-localized' strings as the
base ASN.1 type 'OCTET STRING' and not the dubious IETF SMIv2 type
'DisplayString' (explicitly constrained to 'NVT ASCII'). Nonetheless,
ASCII is a singularly useless character set in the Japanese domestic
market and in most of FX's Asia/Pacific markets for descriptive
information. Useful character sets include ISO 2022-JP and Unicode
UCS-2.
Our Xerox client team and our Fuji Xerox colleagues would like to
request that this defect be repaired by changing the above text to say:
"Localization is only performed on those strings in the MIB that
are explicitly marked as being localized. All other character
strings are returned in the fixed locale (established at 'device
install' time) of this network printer or network print server
(by means outside the scope of this Printer MIB)."
On a related note, we would like to observe that the encodings in the
'prtGeneralCurrentOperator' and 'prtGeneralServicePerson' are equally
flawed, because they depend on: 1) English keywords (eg, 'fax: '); and
2) ASCII linefeeds (0x0A). Forms control characters translate poorly,
if at all, across character sets.
In another US Xerox example, for high-end IBM mainframe printers, the
ideal character set for a 'fixed locale' is EBCDIC. Don't laugh -
monitoring of such printers via the Printer MIB is a real future
requirement at Xerox.
Best Regards,
- Ira McDonald (outside consultant at Xerox)
High North Inc
PO Box 221
Grand Marais, MI 49839