RFC 1486 (rfc1486) - Page 2 of 14
An Experiment in Remote Printing
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1486 An Experiment in Remote Printing July 1993
multiple fonts and faces, a printer that can reproduce graphics, or a
facsimile device. Remote output may be accompanied by information
that identifies the intended recipient. This memo describes a
technique for "remote printing" using the Internet mail
infrastructure. In particular, this memo focuses on the case in
which remote printers are connected to the international telephone
network. Furthermore, it describes an experiment in remote printing.
1.1. The Advantage of a General-Purpose Infrastructure
The experiment in remote printing is about "outreach"; specifically,
integrating the e-mail and facsimile communities. By providing easy
access to remote printing recipients, enterprise-wide access is
enhanced, regardless of kind of institution (e.g., commercial,
educational, or government), or the size of institution (e.g.,
global, regional, or local). This approach at outreach allows an
organization to make it easier for the "outside world" to communicate
with the personnel in the organization who are users of facsimile but
not e-mail; e.g., the sales person, the university registrar, or the
(elected) official. The ease in which the Internet mail
infrastructure can be used to provide this facility is (yet) another
example of the power of a general-purpose infrastructure.
2. Procedure
When information is to be remotely printed, the user application
constructs an RFC 822 [1] message, containing a "Message-ID" field
along with a "multipart/mixed" content [2] having two parts, the
first being a "application/remote-printing" content-type, and the
second being an arbitrary content-type corresponding to the
information to be printed. The message is then sent to the remote
printer server's electronic mail address.
It should be noted that not all content-types have a natural printing
representation, e.g., an "audio" or "video" content. For this
reason, the second part of the "multipart/mixed" content should be
one of the following:
text/plain, message/rfc822, application/postscript image/tiff
(defined in Appendix A), any multipart
Note that:
(1) With the "text/plain" content-type, not all character sets may
be available for printing.
(2) With the "message" content-type, the subordinate content will be
processed recursively.
Rose & Malamud