[cups.general] Any other Details with STR #4169: Add support for PIN, "follow-me", and paid printing?

[Michael Sweet]

Paul,

On 2012-11-14, at 11:11 PM, Paul Conklin <paul.conklin at cerner.com> wrote:
> I see that on the 1.7 roadmap and was curious if there is any backround with it.  I've started work with "Pull Printing" and this sounds very similar.  Pull Printing being that you print to a nebulous print queue in the sky and then authenticate to any printer and it Pulls your print job to it.  Similar to this STR at all?

In this case we aren't getting that specific about the implementation details, just adding support to cupsd, libcups (PPD support), and the IPP backend for printers/services that provide this particular functionality.

Traditionally "follow-me" printing is provided by an in-house server with hardware added to each printer so you can swipe a magnetic/RFID/whatever card to get your prints out at the printer you are at.  There have been some moves to cloud-based solutions, but there are serious legal issues involved with that approach...

PIN printing is the classic "enter your code to get your print" stuff, which is usually provided right in the printer without additional services/software.

Paid printing is a little more complicated; the CUPS support is only at the low level, so additional UI will be required.  Basically a printer/service can tell the client that it is a paid printing service (printer-charge-info-uri, printer-charge-info) using the existing IPP definitions introduced in the recent IPP JPS3 spec.  We've added some additional attributes, job-state-reasons keywords, and status codes to that spec (these will show up in the CUPS IPP documentation soon, and I plan on proposing them as extensions for paid printing to the PWG) to allow the client to know when the user needs to visit the printer-charge-info-uri web page to "buy" more printing, and the platform UI can use the information provided to do the appropriate user notifications...

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Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer, PWG Chair