When the user initiates a print, a print job is created on the workstation by an application. This print job is sent to a printer, as defined by Microsoft. This is not a physical printer, but rather a software application. As if it were a software interface for controlling the printing process. This device is referred to as a “printer. “The person in charge of transferring the job to the physical printer”. But before that, the job must be translated into a printer-friendly language. To accomplish this, the printer driver is being used. Then there’s the print server. This server is in charge of Getting print jobs and delivering them to the printer. It is possible for the print server to be installed on a local computer or connected to a network. Finally, there’s the physical printing device. The printer is the actual device that creates the printout. As you can see, printing in Windows is made up of several different components. The most typical blunder is confusing the print device (physical printer) with the software interface “Printer.” As a result, it’s easy to see why not all printers are considered physical printers, and why Microsoft makes a point of using the term “print device” to indicate when a physical printer is being discussed. Windows also allows you to print locally and over a network. Let’s take a deeper look at the printer driver’s functionality.
Print devices will understand a particular language. Many printer manufacturers have developed their own printer language which will work only 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 that the printer can understand; in this case it is PCL. There are also generic languages that are readily available that may be compatible with your physical printer, but this will need to be researched and tested. The most common of these is postscript. If you install a postscript printer driver, the printer driver will convert the print job into postscript. In fact, not all printers support postscript. It tends to be supported on the high-end printers rather than the lower end printers. In some cases, it is necessary to install an additional module in the physical printer to support postscript. In most cases the PCL driver should meet all 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 has worked well 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 similar feature-wise, this forces the printer to print black and white rather than color when they use that printer. If your management is worried about the usage of color printing and the subsequent costs of that color ink, this would be an excellent solution that would reduce it drastically.
The printer spooler is the next aspect of the printing process. Print jobs will queue and wait in this area before being transmitted to the printer. The tasks in the printer spooler can be in any format, including PCL and postscript. They could potentially be in a temporary format that needs to be processed. Depending on the printer, this processing can be programmed to be done on either end. In very low-cost printers, a lot of extra processing is frequent. Additional processing is offloaded to the computer rather than being done on the printer, in order to keep the printer’s cost as low as feasible. When you have multiple printers, or geographically distant office locations, a print server is a mechanism that provides adequate management and control. Print servers are high-powered appliances or software that help organizations manage files in a printing queue and facilitate the user-printer workflow. Today, print servers can be physical or cloud-based systems that connect devices to specific network printers. Office staff and authorized remote users can submit print requests to place a bid in a queue. It eventually gets printed as a physical file.
Types of Printing
1. Direct Printing
The first method of printing is direct printing. This is when the printer is directly attached to the computer itself and the computer is able to send commands to it directly. This is also known as a locally attached print device. In this case, all the print components are configured on the local computer. The printer is connected to the computer through a direct connection such as USB, but there is the possibility of coming across other types of connections such as firewire and serial cables depending on how old the printer models are.
2. Locally Attached Printing
When a locally attached printer is shared out in a network environment. Like before, you have your computer that is directly connected, such as USB, to a print device itself. The printer components such as the printer, printer driver and printer server are installed on this workstation that is locally attached to the printer. In some cases, the administrator would prefer to share the printer with other workstations on the network. For example, in a small office environment, there may not be a dedicated server installed to handle print jobs but the printers need to be shared anyway. So in this case, a workstation can be used to share the printer so that other workstations on the network are capable of seeing and printing to that printer. In this case, other computers on the network use the shared printer on the workstation using the network. When this occurs, a “printer” (software) needs to be installed on each computer. This will have the local printer receive the print job from the application running on the computer, but the print job will still need to be converted to a format the print device understands. Also, the computer will need to know what features are available on the print device, for example, if it can do double-sided printing or stapling. In order to do this translation and feature determination, the printer driver also needs to be installed on the individual computers that will be printing to this shared printer. The print server is only on one computer. This print server on this computer is responsible for managing the print jobs that are being sent to the print device. If there are a large number of print jobs being sent to this shared printer, it can add additional processing overhead on the workstation sharing the printer. This may affect the performance of the individual using the computer.
3. Network Attached Printing
The next method of printer deployment is network-attached printing. Imagine you have a printer that is connected directly to a stand-alone print server. In the old days, these were generally standalone units that were network attached devices that then directly interfaced with the printer. These would be used for print devices that were not network enabled so that they could be basically retrofitted to fit the network needs. Nowadays, this functionality is available in many other devices. You can still purchase one of those stand-alone devices, however, some devices like routers have this functionality built in. Some physical printers also have expansion slots in them that allow a print server module to be installed, adding network functionality. Furthermore, some print devices themselves sometimes come with print server built in, that allow them to be directly attached and used over the network. The standalone print server has a direct connect to the print device, however it is also connected to the network. This allows the network attached workstations to print to the print device. Like before, the printer and the printer driver need to be installed on the workstations. There are some caveats with this method. First and foremost, there’s no central administrative control. This means that administrators cannot view the print queue and delete any jobs within. If the device allows it, the administrators may be able to login to the device and possibly have some control there but there is no guarantee this will be possible.
Conclusion
Printing process consists of printer software, printer driver, Print server and printing device. Print pooling is the process of connecting multiple printers to a print server. There are three types of printing, which are direct printing, locally attached printing and network attached printing.
