Charter Proposal for

PWG Printer Character Repertoires Specification

Document History

Draft 0.1 E. Bradshaw 10/29/02

Abstract

In traditional printing environments, clients rely on font downloads when they are not sure a given character is embedded in the printer. As printing moves to small clients, downloading may not be an option and clients have a need to know what characters are available in a given device.

The purpose of this group is to:

1. Survey existing methods for indicating available characters, such as those used in the Bluetooth BPP and PWG UPDF
2. Define needs for printing character repertoires, considering such factors as country locations and wingding-type symbols
3. Using Unicode, select or define a list of useful repertoires for printing
4. Recommend a basic repertoire for inclusion in any printer that supports embedded Unicode-accessible characters
5. Propose an extension to the PWG Semantic Model for obtaining the character repertoires available in a printer
6. Work with UPnP and other groups to add repertoire support as needed

In Unicode and W3C documents, the term "character set" usually refers to a method of encoding a (possibly very large) set of characters, e.g. UTF-8. This tells how to encode a given character if it is present, but doesn't define which characters in that space are actually in use.

The term "character repertoire" is used to indicate a subset of characters that is actually present. Since we are assuming Unicode for the overall space of characters, each repertoire will amount to a list of Unicode values.

Examples of repertoires that may be of interest for printing are:

• basic Latin
• extended Latin
• Symbols
• Cyrillic
• Greek
• Japanese

and so forth. The Working Group will agree on whether there are a few large repertoires or many small ones for printing.

Schedule of Documents to be Produced

January 2003: Charter approved

Spring/Summer 2003: Specification: PWG Printer Character Repertoires

Summer 2003: Alignment actions with PWG Semantic Model

Late 2003: Alignment actions with XHTML-Print and/or UPnP, Bluetooth groups

Potential 2004: Alignment actions with W3C or other body defining font downloading