The HP Media Flexibility feature that is present on the HP L, Z and Latex series update the RIP its print modes dynamically when the printer is directly connected to the RIP.
In a set-up where the printer is connected to the PrintStation there is no direct connection of the with the RIP and thus is the list of support medias and modes communicated in another way.
Before build 8229 the user was responsible for manually copying the needed files from the PrintStation to the RIP. This was a task that required some skills and knowledge about the internal of the RIP.
Update mechanism
As of build 8229 the system does the updating automatically in the way as described below. As an example we will use here the “HP Designjet L26500 61in”:
- At the launch of PrintStation the driver will connect with the printer and download the media list from the printer into the appropriate cache folders (details about which cache folder is used for which printer is omitted here)
- When a new media list has been received in step 1 the PrintStation will create a XML in the PrintStation input folder (that is used to receive jobs from the RIP) with the name of the printer. In our example this would be “HP Designjet L26500 61in Configuration.xml”. This XML contains the media list and a unique ID to identify this version of the media list.
- At the launch of the RIP and at the start of every RIP-job the RIP will look in the PrintStation input folder if the unique ID is different from the unique ID it has associated with that printer (that is stored in the RIP preferences and configuration file).
- If the unique ID is different it will load the media list from the XML and pass it to the driver. So the driver can reconfigure itself to adapt to the media list changes.
Printer pooling
When multiple printers of the same type (like “HP Designjet L26500 61in” in this case) are using the same PrintStation input folder then it is required to have all printers have the same media list and same firmware. If this is not done the system will constantly be updating the media list as it will see the differences between the printers and each PrintStation will initiate an update sequence as described above.