The Printer Working Group recently held a face-to-face meeting on
April 26-28, 2016 at HP's facilities in Boise, ID. This event was held
in collaboration with Linux Foundation OpenPrinting Workgroup. Sessions were presented by both organizations over the event's 3 days.
We discussed current and future liaisons with other groups and reviewed
several drafts of in-progress specifications. Here is a summary of the
proceedings.
PWG
In the PWG Plenary, we reviewed the state and uses of the recently created PWG GitHub site
and its repositories. We briefly covered the status of each
working group, and recognized that the IDS working group is now in
hibernation. We discussed the PWG's projects on Github, and the
addition of a repository for Semantic Model schemata maintenance.
We discussed the IPP Everywhere Self Certification site and process,
which is now live though no printers have certified yet. And we
discussed our liaison relationships with Trusted Network Computing,
Trusted Mobility Solutions, Mobile Platform, and NIAP / Common
Criteria. Finally, we discussed Paul Tykodi representing the PWG
at Drupa to present a talk on 3D printing and IPP and the value of open
standards in the creation of new ecosystems.
OpenPrinting Sessions
In the Linux OpenPrinting sessions on the first day, we learned about
the current major issues affecting printing on Linux and other open
source operating systems. Mike Sweet reviewed the state of CUPS
and outlined some of the upcoming enhancements to that system,
including the new Local Print Queue facility. Till Kamppeter
discussed the cups-filters project's effort to maintain facilities no
longer supported by the CUPS project to continue support for legacy
driver systems and older devices. Michael Vrhel reviewed the current
state of Ghostscript and MuPDF and examined some recent enhancements to
those systems. Aveek Basu reviewed the status of Lexmark's Linux driver
support for their enterprise-class printers. Finally, Till
discussed problems with creating driver bundles for different Linux
distributions, and strategies for managing that complexity.
Semantic Model (SM) Workgroup
We discussed the latest "Mapping CIP4 JDF to PWG Print Job Ticket
v1.0 (JDFMAP)" draft, and its status. We are awaiting prototype
status results, and discussed how extensively it needs to be
prototyped.
We discussed the effort of finalizing a release of the Semantic Model v2 (SM2), based on the existing v2.905 draft implementation,
but reverting the version number itself to a version 1.186, with final
revision to be declared v2.0. An effort will be initiated to
synchronize SM2 with the IPP attributes, operations, keywords and enum
values in the IANA IPP registry.
The Semantic Model v3 (SM3) would start with the final SM2 release,
and would not necessarily need to maintain backward compatibility since
it will have a new major version number. Development would follow
the soon-to-be-announced "PWG Policy for Maintenance and Approval of Schemata" PWG policy.
The next Semantic Model Workgroup conference call will be at 3PM EDT, May 16, 2016.
Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) Workgroup
We reviewed the IPP/1.1 RFC updates and the latest drafts of the
IPP System Service, IPP 3D Printing Extensions, and the IPP Finishings
2.1 specifications.
We decided the updates to IPP/1.1 (RFC 2910bis /
RFC 2911bis) were in a state suitable for submission to the IETF for
review. We then moved on to reviewing the recently updated draft
of the IPP System Service, which is making good progress toward reaching
a prototype phase state. We discussed the latest revision of the
IPP 3D Extensions, where we decided to limit the scope but to continue
to make progress on material property descriptions. The next draft
will be labeled as "prototype" status. Finally, we reviewed the
latest draft update to 5100.1 (a.k.a. "Finishings 2.1"), where we
reviewed recent additions and edits, and began a discussion of how to
support the complex situations that arise when certain finishing
operations are limited to only jobs that have a certain orientation or
feed orientation, due to range limits of the finisher's finishing
facilities. We will take this topic up in depth at the next IPP
meetings.
The next Internet Printing Protocol conference call for 3D printing
is on May 16, 2016 at 4pm ET / 1pm PT. The next general conference call
is on May 9, 2016 at 3pm ET / 12pm PT. Please subscribe to the ipp mailing list for details.
Next Meeting
We will hold our next meeting August 23-24, 2016 hosted at Sharp Labs' facilities in Camas, WA.