Re: printing job with different finishings

Hi Michael,

On May 9, 2024, at 17:38, Michael Sweet wrote:
>> It's a pity that you can't assign a finishing per document for "Create-Job" and "Send-Document". Finishing obviously always refers to the complete job.
> 
> Actually, no.  "finishings" is both a Job and Document Template attribute, so a Printer that supports multiple-document jobs (look for multiple-document-jobs-supported=true in the get-printer-attributes.test output) should support finishings in the Send-Document request (in the document-attributes-tag group).

Yipee, the printer supports this!

> The old "job-finishings" attribute (obsolete, from the old PWG 5100.7-2003 Job Extensions spec) was defined to explicitly apply to the whole job, regardless of the value of multiple-document-handling, but we made it obsolete because that just has too many interoperability issues and side-effects.

Sorry I still have these questions despite all the research in the 
documents. I even spent time on IRC (including in the CUPS community) 
and even there this "special case" was unknown.

I have to admit that there is a lot of documentation and you can't 
always tell what is a final version and what is a draft - and of course 
you don't know what the manufacturer (the "black box") has implemented 
in the end.

> "finishings" as a Job Template attribute applies to a Set - so either all of the Documents together or each Document individually depending on "multiple-document-handling".
> 
> "finishings" as a Document Template attribute applies to just that Document. It is basically an override for the whole document (vs. specific Input Pages/Documents in the case of the "overrides" Job Template attribute) but relies on the Printer supporting multiple-document Jobs.

That sounds interesting! I'll try to make it work. I will definitely 
make my conclusions available on "Hacker News" and on Github to help 
others :D

>> Incidentally, during my experiments I noticed that "Validate-Job" cannot be used in combination with "Create-Job" and "Send-Document". I now always send a "Cancel-Job" after it so that the printer does not print a page. Unfortunately, the job counter then counts up :-)
> 
> Validate-Job should not be creating a Job or interacting with any pending Jobs.  It is there solely for validating a Job Ticket, not for actually doing any work.

I'm sorry, I expressed myself in a misleading way. "Validate-Job" does 
indeed not count up, but I can't combine it with "Send-Document". So I 
emulate it by creating a job, sending the document and then canceling 
the job immediately. That way I can see whether my job would work.

Best regards,
Tobias