In this video from ITFreeTraining I will look at the basics for Windows Printing. Understanding
how Windows Printing works will assist you in deploying and supporting Windows Printing
in your company.
To start with, I will look at the terminology that Windows uses for printing. First you
have your workstation. On the workstation, an application creates a print job. This print
job is transferred to what Microsoft refers to as a printer. This is not a hardware device
like a physical printer, more on that in a moment, but a software interface that controls
the printing process.
The printer is responsible for transferring the job to the physical printer, but before
this happens the job must be converted to a language that the printer can understand.
To do this, the printer driver is used.
Next you have the print server. This is responsible for receiving print jobs and sending them
to the print device. The print server can be installed locally or attached to the network.
Lastly you have the print device, this is the physical device that produces the print out.
You can see there are a few different parts that make up printing in Windows. The most
common mistake is to mix up the print device, which is the physical printer, with printer,
which is the software interface. It may seem strange at first, but keep in mind that printers
like PDF printers output to a file rather than a physical printer. For this reason you
can see why not all printers can be considered to be physical printers and why Microsoft
has gone for the term print device to make it clear when a physical printer is being
talked about.
Windows also supports printing locally and across the network. Let’s have a closer
look at how the printer driver works.
Print devices will understand a particular language. Many printer manufacturers have
developed their own printing language which will only work with those printers. These
native languages are referred to in Windows as Printer Control Languages or PCL. If you
consider a print job, it is the job of the printer driver to convert the print job into
a format the printer can understand, in this case PCL.
There are also generic languages that are available that your physical printer may understand.
The most common of these is postscript. If you install a postscript printer driver, the
printer driver will convert the print job into postscript. Not all printers support
postscript. It tends to be supported on the high end printers rather than the lower end
printers. In some cases, an additional module may need to be installed in the physical printer
to support postscript. In most cases the PCL driver should meet your needs, but in some
rare cases you may need postscript support.
The printer driver also provides access to features of the printer, for example double
sided printing. You can see here a typical example of the properties of a printer. Since
every printer is different and has different features, it makes sense to have these features
inside the printer driver.
One trick that I have used in the past is to install a black and white printer driver
for a color printer. If you can find a printer driver that is compatible and feature-wise
very close, this forces the user to print black and white rather than color when they
use that printer. If your management is worried about how much color printing is done, this
is one way to reduce the amount of color printing.
The next part of the printing process that I will look at is the printer spooler. This
is where printed jobs wait before being transferred to the print device. In later videos I will
look more at the printer spooler.
The jobs in the printer spooler may be in a complete format like PCL or postscript.
They also may be in an interim format that requires additional processing. This processing
can generally be configured to be performed on either end depending on the printer.
A lot of additional processing is common in very low cost printers. In order to keep the
cost of the printer as low as possible, additional processing that would normally be done by
the printer is offloaded. If the printer, remember I am now talking about the software
running on Windows, is installed on a server, the processing can be done here. This may
add additional load to the server. This completes this video on the basics of
Windows Printing. In the next video, I will look at how flexible Windows Printing can
be - allowing printing to be performed locally or across the network with ease. Until that
video, I would like to thank you for watching.