Print Drivers

[ICTSM]

In all these years, I have never quite grasped what the different drivers are for a printer. When you visit a website which offers the drivers, you can be presented by a few different types, but mainly Postscript and PCL.

 

What are these driver types and what are their different uses?

Edited January 26, 2010 by ICTSM

[localzuk]

They define what 'language' that the PC speaks to the printer in.

 

PCL was designed by HP back in 1984 when the only choice was PS (at the time owned by Adobe, so licensing would have been required).

PS is PostScript, designed back in 1976, and adapted over the years to work with various printers, such as Apple's Lasers, not to mention that using PS was a memory and processor intensive activity (so needed high spec machines to print from).

 

There are others, such as RPCS, which is more aimed at vector printing (and was designed by Ricoh).

 

Some printers only support one of them (PCL seems to be popular choice now), some support a couple and some support more.

[Michael]

Localzuk has summed it up very well. For your reference I'd recommend you search/install for PCL5 wherever possible.

[SYNACK]

For your reference I'd recommend you search/install for PCL5 wherever possible.

 

Unless you are doing graphics work at which point the PS drivers can yeild a better result as there is less conversion between the graphics programs output and the printers interpretation.