Jeff said:
> For those printers that are equipped with a bi-directional I/O port (for
> the case of external JetDirect cards) that can return printer status, yes,
> they not only keep track but the spooler drivers have page level recovery.
> If not, then yes, as you noted, it's just like a DTC connection and you
> can lose data.  For example, the 5000/C30 does not have a bidirectional
> interface; the 5000/C40 does.
 
Oooooh. Ahhhh. Cool. I wasn't aware that the newest Jet Direct stuff had
this capability.
 
> >Lots of 3rd-party solutions for this today of course (NBSPOOL, etc.),
> >but it would be nice to have HP support the standard unix remote
> >printing protocols directly.
>
> Yes, but all 3rd-party solutions implement a periodic scan of the spool
> queues looking for candidates.[...]
 
This has been something that ought to be addressed via an AIF.
It should be possible to ask the system to awaken your process as soon as
there is a new spoolfile in a particular 'queue'. This
would let all the 3rd party software that currently has to do polling
switch to an interrupt style of processing, which would greatly reduce
their overhead, and eliminate the delays that currently exist before a
new spoolfile will be seen and processed.
 
G.