OperatorActions procedures

This page applies to Harlequin v13.1r0 and later; both Harlequin Core and Harlequin MultiRIP.

If a job makes a page device request that cannot be satisfied, one of the options offered by the Policies entry is to ask for help operator intervention. What this means is not defined, but it might be a message to the operator to say “please insert letter size tray”, for example.

A procedure in the page device keyed by /OperatorActions is provided for this purpose. You can implement this procedure if it is appropriate in your design; in that case, the default procedure leaves the page device dictionary unchanged and reverts to the behavior of the undefined policy.

The behavior of a typical OperatorActions procedure is to run a file on a device whose semantics are to display an appropriate message and wait for a reply. In GUI versions, remember not to block while waiting for the reply. On the device, you may need to specify what the unsatisfied request is in order to compose a suitable message. In the following example, the device is provided with parameters Width and Height. Note that interaction may not be needed.

For example:

            <<
              /OperatorActions { (%operatoraction%) dup <<
                currentpagedevice /PageSize get aload pop
                /Height exch /Width 4 -1 roll /Password 0
              >> setdevparams
              run % may put up a dialog and wait for a response
            } bind
            /Policies <<
              /PageSize 2 % 2 means "ask the operator"
            >>
            >> setpagedevice

The SensePageDevice call and the merging and media matching stages are automatically executed again after OperatorActions so that the new state of the page device can be determined and acted on (assuming that you made a change that SensePageDevice can detect).