[contestms-dev] Re: Printing
- From: Luca Wehrstedt <luca.wehrstedt@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: contestms-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 11:25:27 +0100
As all the IOIs I took part to weren't "paperless" I did never print
anything and I don't know the needs of contestants on the matter. Yet I
feel that being unable to print from the usual application dialog, but
having to use it to produce a PDF to send via the web server instead, is an
inconvenience of your proposal (the only one I found).
On the other hand, even if I did never set up printers, I have heard it's
veeery complicated to configure CUPS correctly (at IOI 2012 it took a
dedicated staff member a few days of work). Therefore I think the benefit
to contest admins greatly overcomes the disadvantage for contestants.
As Giovanni said, the code to do it wouldn't be tightly integrated with
CMS: apart from the web interface to submit files to print and some fields
in the database to specify settings, the PrintingService would be
autonomous. Most of its code will verify constraints, add front pages and
interact with printers (via CUPS?). I suggest to keep the CMS-dependent
parts as marginal as possible, to allow easy adaptation to other
environments.
Luca
Hi,
what do you think about integrating a printing interface into CMS (i.e.
contestants print by submitting a file to the CWS)?
I think it might be a bit easier to enforce printing policies (each
contestant
should print at most x pages in total and each print job should have at
most y
pages, contestants should not mess around with the printer settings) and add
some header stating where to deliver the print job. Most of these things
could
be implemented once and then be reused at every contest.
I'm not sure how printing has been handled at past IOIs. Did you set up some
kind of "shared virtual printer" in CUPS, that adds the header and forwards
to
the real printer?
Direct printer access would only have to be established on the contest
server
if we support printing via the web interface.
During recent IOI and ICPC competitions it seems to have become a
"tradition"
that printing didn't work as expected at least during the practice session
:).
I don't know what the reasons for these issues were, but maybe some of them
could be avoided in the future if we restrict to more "basic" printing via
CWS?
We should at least support printing text files (with automatic source code
formatting) and pdf files. Most usual application printing dialogs can
export
to pdf, I guess, so contestants could in principle still print anything they
want.
A fixed user-printer association might be desirable for example in the case
that the contestants are distributed across multiple rooms and there is one
printer in each room.
By the way, a few germany IOI coaches are meeting this weekend to hack on
the
contest system. For example we are writing a german importer format. More on
this later...
Best,
Fabian
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