[1] It provides an attachment-independent interface for controlling and managing all point addressable (APA) printers that allow the presentation of pages containing an architecturally unlimited mixture of different data types, including text, image, graphics, bar code, and object container.
Generally, these printers are at the medium to the high end of the print speed and volume spectrum.
The output of these independent applications is merged at the printer to create an integrated mixed data page.
IPDS carries data and instructions from the print server to the printer in structured fields.
The printer controller processes these IPDS commands and returns an acknowledgment to the print server.