Xi-Text

Form types: printing by what it is, not where it goes

This is the idea the rest of the product follows from.

Most printing systems require you, or your application, to name the printer. Xi-Text lets you name a form type instead - invoice, letterhead, cheque, greenbar - and finds an available printer carrying that form.

Three things follow, without any change to your applications:

Printer pooling comes free. If several printers carry the same form type, Xi-Text treats them as a pool and sends each job to the next available one.

Inoperative printers are bypassed. A printer that is down is simply not available to the pool; work continues on the others.

Printer features become accessible. A form type can also invoke a printer capability - paper tray, orientation, font, character pitch, duplex. standard.11 selects the letter-size tray; standard.14 selects the legal-size tray. Same file, same command, different suffix.

You can still name a specific printer when you need to.

Job restart and selective print

Any job interrupted by hardware failure, communication error or operator intervention can be restarted at the point of interruption, at the start of the document, or at any specified page.

You can also print a range of pages - which, on a long run that failed near the end, is the difference between reprinting six pages and reprinting sixty thousand.

On-line viewing before printing

A built-in viewer handles text jobs and external programs can be invoked for other formats. Many sites hold every job without printing until it has been viewed and approved.

One screen for every printer and job

Printers and jobs are shown together, updating dynamically, across the whole network. Control functions take one or two keystrokes. Build logical queues by job title, owning user or system, with pattern matching to select them quickly.

Class-code security

lp lets anyone act on everything in the queue. Xi-Text uses class codes to control what a group or user can see and act on.

Codes restrict groups to particular printers or printer types - horizontal security - and within a group give individual users different privilege levels - vertical security. A group can be defined by the form they use: create a group for the cheque stock, assign the secure printer to them, and nobody outside the group can reach it.

Per user, an administrator controls priority range, form type selection, copy counts, access to the printer list, starting and stopping printers, and whether they can act on other users' jobs. A user can see their own privileges by typing spuser.

Transparent networking

Printers are identified and accessed by name regardless of physical location or communications hardware. As printers and systems are added, Xi-Text registers them to every other Xi-Text system on the network automatically.

Chargeback accounting

Detailed logs of print volume, printer and forms usage. Charges tracked by printer and by form type, with an option to apply extra charges to jobs moved up the queue by priority change.

Fault tolerance

On system failure only the jobs on that system are affected; the queue recovers automatically on restart. On network failure, jobs needing a printer in the failed segment are held, or sent automatically to another printer of the same class.