At our Open Source Client meeting tonight, we agreed that we should all
submit User Scenarios illustrating features that users would find useful. A
suggestion of the technology to implement the feature was also encouraged.
Then Craig Whittle volunteered to help organize a prioritization of them.
So, here is a suggested contribution to the User Scenarios for features that
an Open Source client for Windows could support:
On Windows batch many prints into a single job (single output document)
I'd like to be able to print from any number of applications, any number of
times, but have the output from each collected into a single print job,
perhaps so I can have it all stapled as a single output document. I want to
go pick it up as a single job from my network printer. Perhaps my network
printer supports fan-out, so that sending a lot of little jobs over the
period of an hour results in them being sent randomly to the fanned-out
printers. This batching of separate print jobs into a single print job
would be particularly useful from applications such as Outlook or Eudora
where I want to print certain mail messages as I'm reading them, but only
want them all printed together as a single job (and all stapled together).
However, I might like to include output from any other application that I
happen to be running during the same period. On the other hand, I might,
during the same period, also want to print something big separately and
immediately.
Possible technology implementation:
Install a special "printer" that collects jobs and doesn't actually submit
them until told to do so by me explicitly. So any Windows printing that I
do to that Printer gets accumulated into one big job. Perhaps this printer
actually submits the big job as an IPP job that consists of separate
documents. I'd like to be able to specify "finishings" as one of the staple
values, such as 'staple-dual-left', and with the option of either
"multiple-document-handling" = 'single-document-new-sheet', so that each
little job starts on a new sheet, OR "multiple-document-handling" =
'single-document' so that each little job just starts on a new side.
Comments?
Is this what was meant at the meeting for a User Scenario that is a user
feature that we could prioritize?
Tom
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