In the long term, fax machines will need to have conversion handled by the
"servers" (in the client/server
model, not the IPP server). For instance a mail server (in the future)
should be able to note that as it
trys to deliver an email to a device that is at the end of a modem and only
has G3 capability, converts to a
compressed G3 wrapped by TIFF (since that is the standard) and then
delivers.
Similar for IPP. The IPP "sender" notes that the IPP "receiver" can only
deal with G3, and requests
conversion from some resource. If no conversion is available then it can't
send. Saves everyone time.
Conversion issues work fine where there is an intervening intelligence with
lots of disk space and CPU
horsepower...i.e. a "server" of some sort that provides services to help the
IPP transaction take place.
IPP between two low capability devices means conversions will probably not
take place if there is a mismatch
of image handling capabilities. This spells "failure to send" messages
between non-matching devices. For
fax, this might mean a low cost color (is this an oxymoron?) fax (or
scanner) will not be able to deliver to
a low cost color printer, simply because there is not enough horsepower to
do the conversion and thus the
conversion capability is not present in either.
The result is that we all would like capabilities exchange, but have not
thought through what we do when there
is not a match on capabilities...we know we probably need to convert, but
haven't thoroughly gone through the
process of figuring IF we can convert or where that conversion can or should
take place. The email transport
guys have an easier job, the mail server application can request services of
the server it is resident on and get the
conversion done (for instance, NT and MS BackOffice installed servers will
be able to request conversions
based on MIME type to MIME type conversion requests...or so we've been
told...when? not sure).
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nick Webb [SMTP:nwebb@auco.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 1999 2:12 PM
> To: mcrawford@iready.com
> Cc: geoffm@transwire.net; ifx@pwg.org
> Subject: RE:
>
>
> >So where is a Word Doc going to get converted to something a fax can
> >print?
> >
> >The reason TIFF is used on T.37 is that it puts a wrapper around the
> native
> >formats...G3, G4,
> >or one of the color types supported on color fax. No conversion takes
> >place.
>
> Right, I think it's unlikely we'd ever want to handle Word documents, if
> for no other reason than the formats keep changing with each version of
> Word so it's unlikely to be a candidate for embedding in a printer.
>
> But, since we're basing on IPP, I can see a requirement to handle
> Postscript, PCL, PDF in addition to straight raster formats.
> Cheers,
> Nick Webb
>