On the SM telecon today, we had a debate about whether or not the job level
-actual values should be multi-valued?
(Presumably, the Job Template attributes that are multi-valued should have
their corresponding -actual attributes be multi-values, such as
"finishings", "insert-sheets", "document-overrides", and "page-overrides".).
But most Job Template attributes are single valued.
However, an actual job could actually use more than one value for any of the
following reasons:
1. In a single document job, the PDL selects different values during the
document, such as media.
2. The job has multiple documents and different documents have different
values.
3. In a single document job, the "page-overrides" Job Template attribute
specifies different values for different page ranges.
4. In a multi-document job, the "document-overrides" Job Template attribute
specifies different values for different documents.
5. In a multi-document job where the Document Object is implemented, each
document could have a different values.
There were two points of view expressed on the telecon:
1. The Job level -actual is multi-valued (as in the spec) and the Printer
includes all values actually used anywhere in the job as the value of the
"xxx-actual" at the Job level. In other words, the xxx-actual (1setOf yyy)
is the subset of the "xxx-supported" that actually got used.
2. Peter was against multi-values -actual values and suggested that we could
use the "document-overrides-actual" and "page-overrides-actual" instead to
handle the cases where more than one value was needed. But we never got to
discuss it.
Here is the beginning of the discussion:
2a. Using "page-overrides-actual" seems good for things that vary by page in
a document. So even if a PDL switches media in mid document, the Printer
could accurately represent that using "page-overrides-actual". Say the
first sheet in letter-head and the remaining are just plain paper:
page-overrides-actual {
{output-documents = '1:1';
pages = 1:2;
media = 'letter-head'},
{output-documents = '1:1';
pages = 3:47;
media = 'na-letter'}
}
ISSUE 01: So OK for an implementation to use "page-overrides-actual" to
represent multiple values in a document?
ISSUE 02: However, suppose an implementation doesn't want to go to the
trouble of supporting page-overrides? Is it OK for it to support the Job
level actuals with multiple values? Then can it fuzz the results by having
multiple values as the Job level (or at the Document level when
implementing the Document object)
2b. Using "document-overrides" doesn't seem a good way to handle things that
vary between documents. Using the Document object seems preferable.
ISSUE 03: On the other hand, if an implementation wants to do actuals, but
not the Document object, is it OK for it to support the
"document-overrides-actual"?
Comments?
Tom
P.S. I won't be at the PWG meeting, so have a good discussion on the -actual
proposal. Its seems like a good idea for both IPP and the PWG Semantic
Model.