[Info-vax] DCPS V2.7 and Brother printers

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-03-25 19:11:02 +0000, Mark Berryman said:

Fat-fingering my replies today.  Ah, well.

> On 3/25/19 10:15 AM, Paul Anderson wrote:

...

>> ...Really?  98%?  Back when we worked for HP, the folks who implemented 
>> IPP V1 in the printers said they weren't going to update IPP at all, as 
>> they thought IPP was not going to have much of a future.  Maybe V1 was 
>> "good enough" and that's what's in their printers today.
> 
> Are these the same folks who said "OSI will replace TCP/IP"?
> or "Groups with guitars are on their way out"?
> or "Everything that can be invented has been invented"?
> (of course, those sayings are now considered apocryphal).

HP was selling iPods back then, and was also betting heavily on Itanium, too.

Everybody makes bad decisions.  Revisiting and correcting assumptions 
and decisions and designs that were wrong to start with, or that have 
aged out, or that have encountered changing requirements?   That's 
valuable.

> Every network printer I've looked at in the last 5 years supports IPP. 
> Most, if not all, support IPP Everywhere.  With IPP Everywhere, one can 
> always query the printer for its URI.
> 
> I also haven't seen one that won't print both PDF and postscript 
> natively but I believe PDF is the only thing that is mandated.

Adobe did what they could to deprecate PostScript in favor of PDF, but 
there are a lot of printers with Postscript emulation.  Including 
Brother printers, including members of the MFC series printers.

How many OpenVMS apps are willing to or even capable of generating PDF? 
 Donno.  That if the printing system is not performing the conversion 
during printing.

> My opinion: add IPP support to DCPS quickly.
> Consider porting CUPS to VMS somewhere down the road.

As time and staff is available for printing, yes.  Reducing the need 
for printer-specific integration with support for IPP is going to be a 
benefit for support.  Roll DCPS into the base distro, too.  Make it all 
work together, and make it easier to manage.



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