On Jan 30, 9:37pm, Larry Masinter wrote:
>In-reply-to: <199701290402.UAA21955@woden.eng.sun.com> (rherriot@eng.sun.com)
> # o it may be useful for a printer to indicate that it only understands
> # an attribute if it is embedded in the document so that a client knows
> # whether to embed it. This concept is probably most useful in a ppdfile
> # context which describes either the PDL string to embed or the attribute
> # to set.
>
> This may be useful but not very. By the time you add the code to the
> printer to tell the client that "this printer doesn't understand that
> attribute if it isn't embedded", you might as well have fixed it to
> actually understand it.
Let me describe a little about how EFI works, as I beleive it relevent to the
above discussion. We create one external network rip that sits next to copier,
where the copier can be one of any number of models from a number of companies.
We "customize" for each copier by loading a video driver that is specific to
the copier. Engine specific commands are fed to the video driver from a host
driver by including commands in the data stream that are retreived from a host
PPD and sent to the printer. The PDL will feed the device specific commands to
the video driver without knowing what the commands specifically do.
So, there is some code in the machine that understands the commands but if the
commands are not fed through the data stream, then the feature will not be
used.
Gail
--Gail Songer Electronics For Imaging gail.songer@eng.efi.com 2855 Campus Drive (415) 286-7235 San Mateo, CA 94403