Technical data

notification
Result and error reporting by a server to the client that had requested
its services. Generally, the mechanisms needed to implement notification
are provided by the system infrastructure. In most system environments,
electronic mail can be used as a crude means for notification.
object
An abstraction used to represent various entities, such as printers and
queues. Each print system object contains a collection of attributes. See
also attributes.
operator
A class of user, defined by POSIX and X/OPEN, enforced by security.
An operator can perform day-to-day operations, such as pausing and
resuming jobs and printers and disabling and enabling printers. See also
administrator, user.
output device
A printer. A physical device or hardware that is capable of rendering images
or documents. A marking engine.
physical device
An actual output device with specific characteristics and capabilities. See
also physical printer.
physical printer
A software representation of a physical device. Physical printer objects
reside in supervisor processes and their databases. See also physical device.
POSIX
The IEEE standards body that is chartered with standardizing portable
operating system interfaces. In this document, POSIX refers to the
operating system interface standard for printing: POSIX 1387.4-System
Administration-Part 4: Printing Interfaces.
queue
A spooler object that partitions logical and physical printers. A given printer
can only exist in a single queue, thus queues partition printers into disjoint
sets. The default print system spooler configuration is a single queue.
Within a queue, a logical printer can be associated with one or more of
the physical printers of the queue. The default association is to all of the
physical printers.
Additionally, queues impose an ordering on the jobs submitted to the logical
printers of the queue. This imposed order is known as selection order. The
algorithm for this ordering is configurable (FIFO or shortest job first).
Glossary–2