Bug 693053

Summary: -dNOMEDIAATTRS needs better documentation
Product: Ghostscript Reporter: Hin-Tak Leung <htl10>
Component: CUPS driverAssignee: Till Kamppeter <till.kamppeter>
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX    
Severity: normal CC: htl10, mike, twaugh
Priority: P4    
Version: master   
Hardware: PC   
OS: Linux   
Customer: Word Size: ---
Bug Depends on:    
Bug Blocks: 694976    

Description Hin-Tak Leung 2012-05-20 01:06:15 UTC 
The current documentation is a bit lacking. I think some better description of what it does is needed.

Ghostscript is supposed to be used with an InputAttributes dictionary (possibly set via setpagedevice at the beginning of the job, or other hardware mechanism if used in an embedded usage) which describes what are the available media, and what attributes they have, to know what media choices is available, and try to match that to media selection setpagedevice calls. In the absence of an InputAttributes dictionary, most media selection setpagedevice calls are dropped; this seems to be overriden by the -dMEDIAATTRS switch, which allows them to pass-through.

AFAIK only two drivers do anything with the information, - pcl5 and pxl (for MediaPosition/tray selection), and may be one or two of the 3rd party drivers.

See also bug 687899, trunk@5831, 
trunk@5995, for background information, and Resource/Init/gs_setpd.ps for the actual NOMEDIAATRS conditionals, and also some recent discussion in
Bug 692914 (Postscript MediaType lost in tranformation to PCL).
Comment 1 Till Kamppeter 2018-06-08 19:29:15 UTC 
Report is already 6 years old and no additional complaints. Closing.