Elliott,
I agree that it's a good idea. I've been wondering how a sending
application would know what fonts and characters are available in a printer.
It also seems to me that a certain level of consistency would improve
printing across a range of printers and promote acceptance of mobile
printing by improving the user printing experience, i.e., the user prints a
job to any printer and doesn't have the experience of a document printing on
one printer and not on another.
This also seems to me very important in Europe and Asian were there are lots
of mobile users and characters outside the North American character set.
A printer that conforms to the CSS Print Profile must support a minimum set
of characters since the CSS2 specification says
(http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts.html#generic-font-families):
"15.2.6 Generic font families
[...}All five generic font families are defined to exist in all CSS
implementations (they need not necessarily map to five distinct actual
fonts). User agents should provide reasonable default choices for the
generic font families, which express the characteristics of each family as
well as possible within the limits allowed by the underlying technology. "
I don't know if this defines a set of characters that is sufficient for
printing world-wide. Perhaps, that is a question for the proposed group to
answer.
The W3C has had some interest in this topic and is doing some work for CSS3
on fonts and web fonts. However, I think the PWG is the place to approach
this from a printing point of view. However, I don't know if a new group
should be chartered or the UPnP/XHTML-Print group asked to consider this.
Jim Bigelow
Hewlett-Packard
-----Original Message-----
From: ElliottBradshaw at oaktech.com [mailto:ElliottBradshaw at oaktech.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2002 12:49 PM
To: BIGELOW,JIM (HP-Boise,ex1)
Subject: Character repertoires in printers
Jim, could I get your two cents on this? Specifically I'd like to know if
anyone at HP will take part. Otherwise I'll probably let it drop, as only a
few people have responded.
I still think it's a good idea...
E.
------------------------------------------
Elliott Bradshaw
Director, Software Engineering
Oak Technology Imaging Group
781 638-7534
----- Forwarded by Elliott Bradshaw/oaktech/us on 10/24/2002 03:48 PM -----
Elliott
Bradshaw To: pwg-announce at pwg.org
cc:
10/21/2002 Subject: Character repertoires
in printers
01:00 PM
Folks,
As we discussed in Santa Fe, I am interested in the possibility of defining
standard printer character repertoires for interoperability.
For discussion, a draft charter of a hypothetical working group follows:
<charter>
In traditional printing environments, clients rely on font downloads when
they are not sure a given character is embedded in the printer. As printing
moves to small clients, downloading may not be an option and clients have a
need to know what characters are available in a given device.
The purpose of this group is to:
1. Survey existing methods for indicating available characters, such as
those used in the Bluetooth BPP 2. Define needs for printing character
repertoires, considering such factors as country locations and wingding-type
symbols 3. Using Unicode, select or define a list of useful repertoires for
printing 4. Recommend a basic repertoire for inclusion in any printer that
supports embedded Unicode-accessable characters 5. Propose an extension to
the PWG Semantic Model for obtaining the character repertoires available in
a printer 6. Work with UPnP and other groups to add repertoire support as
needed </charter>
Before proceeding, I would like any and all feedback on these questions:
1. Is this a problem worth solving? (vs. vendor-specific solutions) 2.
Should it be treated as part of XHTML-Print, UPnP, or some other group? (as
opposed to a separate working group) 3. Who is interested in
participarting, as author or reviewer?
If there is sufficient interest I will prepare a more complete proposal.
Thanks,
Elliott
------------------------------------------
Elliott Bradshaw
Director, Software Engineering
Oak Technology Imaging Group
781 638-7534