Summary of April 2016 Face-to-Face Meeting

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.