Subject: PWG-ANNOUNCE> Character repertoires in printers

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 13:00:51 -0400

Folks,

As we discussed in Santa Fe, I am interested in the possibility of defining
standard printer character repertoires for interoperability.

For discussion, a draft charter of a hypothetical working group follows:

<charter>
In traditional printing environments, clients rely on font downloads when
they are not sure a given character is embedded in the printer.  As
printing moves to small clients, downloading may not be an option and
clients have a need to know what characters are available in a given
device.

The purpose of this group is to:
1.  Survey existing methods for indicating available characters, such as
those used in the Bluetooth BPP
2.  Define needs for printing character repertoires, considering such
factors as country locations and wingding-type symbols
3.  Using Unicode, select or define a list of useful repertoires for
printing
4.  Recommend a basic repertoire for inclusion in any printer that supports
embedded Unicode-accessable characters
5.  Propose an extension to the PWG Semantic Model for obtaining the
character repertoires available in a printer
6.  Work with UPnP and other groups to add repertoire support as needed
</charter>

Before proceeding, I would like any and all feedback on these questions:

1.  Is this a problem worth solving?  (vs. vendor-specific solutions)
2.  Should it be treated as part of XHTML-Print, UPnP, or some other group?
(as opposed to a separate working group)
3.  Who is interested in participarting, as author or reviewer?

If there is sufficient interest I will prepare a more complete proposal.

  Thanks,
  Elliott

------------------------------------------
Elliott Bradshaw
Director, Software Engineering
Oak Technology Imaging Group
781 638-7534

---

From: Michael Sweet <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 14:19:20 -0400

[email-masked] wrote:
 > ...

Yes.

 > 2.  Should it be treated as part of XHTML-Print, UPnP, or some other
 > group? (as opposed to a separate working group)

Probably as part of an existing group.

 > 3.  Who is interested in participarting, as author or reviewer?

I'd be interested, at least in the reviewer/back-seat-driver role. :)

....

Some immediate thoughts based on my own experiences, and without
looking at the Bluetooth docos.

1. Aside from the Euro, all printers seem to provide the basic
    Latin characters needed for English and most Western European
    languages.  If you do a language/country-based scheme, it should
    address the presence/absence of the Euro symbol as a separate
    entity. [this doesn't quite sound right to me, but in the context
    of ISO Latin 1 the Euro is a major pain WRT support in printers;
    do with it what you will...]

2. Providing a list of Unicode ranges may be the simplest way
    of reporting what the device supports, and the client can use
    this to choose embedding/exclusion/error display when the
    user prints something.  This needs to be a per-font resource.

3. In addition to or instead of #2, you could define a CSS
    attribute that determines what the device does for characters
    it does not have: exclude (blanks or squares), substitute (from
    another font with the required characters), or error out.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products                  [email-masked]
Printing Software for UNIX                       http://www.easysw.com