[cups.development] [RFE] STR #1382: Please pre-process next document while printing current document

[Scott Alexander]

[STR New]

I have a Xerox Phaser 6100 connected to a Macintosh Powerbook (via
network).  The Xerox has the unfortunate design that it requires all
document processing to occur on the host.  As such, for any reasonably
complex document, there is a long delay before the document starts
printing.  And, of course, if I print multiple documents, there is a long
pre-processing delay, then the first one prints.  Only after cups has sent
the last page to the printer does the second document start the long delay
of its pre-processing and so on.

I would like to be able to configure, on a per-printer basis, the ability
to print and pre-process in parallel.  I can imagine two reasonable
approaches.  In the first, there would be separate queues for processing
and printing documents (with the obvious synchronization so that no
document prints before it has been pre-processed).  In the second
approach, each time a document starts printing, the next document is
pre-processed.

The advantage to the former approach is that if a user queues a number of
documents, leaves his office to do something else while they print, then
returns to discover that the printer ran out of paper on the first
document, printing proceeds at the rate the printer can print even if
pre-processing the next job takes longer than printing for some jobs (eg,
if a short document is followed by a long document in the queue).  The
advantage of the second approach is that it doesn't use as much disk
space, minimizes CPU use for cases where the output of the first job
determines that the remaining jobs must be cancelled, etc.

Thanks for considering this request.

Link: http://www.cups.org/str.php?L1382
Version:  -feature