Instructor: In this lesson,
we're going to talk about printer drivers.
In an operating system like Windows or Mac OS,
a printer is not actually a physical device.
Instead, it's just a program that can control one
or more physical printers,
which are called print devices by Windows.
Now, printer drivers are integrated into the printer itself
as far as Windows is concerned,
and this allows Windows to have a lot
of flexibility because a single printer
or software printer under Windows
can actually support multiple print devices
or numerous physical printers.
Therefore, the system can actually act as a print server
and automatically redirect the output
to a working print device
if a different print device has become inoperable.
This is how it works in large organizations
when you have multiple printers on a single floor
of your office building.
One of the basic principles of the Windows operating system
is that application developers should not have
to worry about the details of specific hardware in order
to utilize it.
So if I make an application like a word processing program
and I want my users to be able to print out a document,
my program should simply be able
to turn over to Windows and say,
"Hey Windows, I want to print this thing out.
You take care of all the hard work and make that happen."
So to support this and all of the hundreds
of different print models that are out there,
Windows turns to print drivers.
They use these different print drivers
to convert the data into output that
that specific printer could understand.
When you're installing a printer,
you have to install the associated print driver.
Windows by default includes a lot of print drivers,
but it doesn't necessarily have the print drivers
for every single model of printer
because there are literally hundreds
and thousands of different models of printers
that have been invented in the last 30, 40, 50,
or 60 years that we've been using computers.
So when you purchase a new printer from Canon,
or Epson, or Lexmark, or Brother, or Xerox,
that manufacturer will actually give you a disc
with the right drivers for your particular printer
that'll work on Windows, Linux, or Mac,
or all three of them, depending on the manufacturer.
In addition to getting these on a disc,
you can also go to the manufacturer's website
and download it from their support section.
In order to install these manufacturer supplied drivers,
you can use the installation program provided
by that manufacturer on the disc
or you can go into the device manager
and Windows and be able to install your drivers that way.
Note, in order to be able to install these print drivers,
you do have to have administrative rights
or privileges inside of Windows.
If you're not an administrator,
you're not going to be able to actually finish the installation
of those drivers.
In addition to getting these specific drivers
from your manufacturer,
Windows Update also tries to find drivers
for you that will work for your printer.
Windows updates will allow you
to get the latest print drivers
through the internet because sometimes the print drivers
will change or become updated over time
and the disc that came with your printer is now out of date.
If Windows Update can't find the driver for you,
you can always go to your manufacturer's website,
click on support,
and then search for the correct driver for your printer
and your particular version of your operating system.
If for some reason you're having problems
with your printer and you want to remove the drivers,
you're going to go into the Device Manager inside
of Windows, right click on the device driver
that you want to uninstall, and select Uninstall.
Many printers, especially newer ones that come
with a lot of bundled applications and software,
will also have an uninstall option underneath the programs
and features area inside of Windows.
If you want to see what printers
are installed on your system and you're using Windows 11,
simply go to Start, Settings, Bluetooth & devices,
and then Printers & scanners.
If you want to see a list of printers installed on your system
and you're using Windows 10, you can go to Start,
then select Settings, Devices, Printers & scanners.
And if you're using a Mac system,
you can simply find your printers by going to Settings,
Printers & scanners.
So now that you understand how to install,
remove, or update your print drivers,
let's talk a little bit more
about the print drivers themself.
When it comes to print drivers,
these are referred to as a page description language,
or PDL.
A page description language is used
to create a master file from the print commands.
They're sent by the software application
into a dot-by-dot representation of what the printer
should recreate when it puts ink or toner on a page.
Most page description languages
are going to support scalable fonts,
vector graphics, and color printing.
When I talk about scalable fonts,
this is the capability of making text any size you want
from really, really small to really, really large.
To do this, the operating system
and its printers have to support scalable true type
or open type fonts.
Luckily for us, Windows, Linux,
and Mac all support the ability
to have scalable fonts when you're printing.
The second area we have inside
of our page description language is the ability
to do vector graphics.
A vector graphic allows you to blow up
or shrink down your image before printing it onto the page.
If you're using something like a bitmap graphic,
this can actually lead to some distortion,
but if you're using vector graphics,
these can actually scale up infinitely
without having any loss in clarity.
The third feature of the page description languages
is color printing.
In the very first printers,
the only capability they had was to print in black ink
and only to be able to print in certain letters,
just like a typewriter would.
Over time, this textual limitation went away
and graphics could then be produced.
And then even further down the line,
color was introduced.
When it comes to printing things in color,
you actually have to translate this
into what's known as CMY.
CMY stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black,
with K being black.
Why do they use K for black?
Well, because black is the key that we use
for our printing and so they use K for black.
I like to think about it as K is the last letter in black
and that's how I remember it.
When you look at a picture on your computer display,
you're actually getting what's called RGB.
This is red, green, and blue.
These three colors are going to be mixed together
to create all the other colors you see on your screen.
But when we actually print something,
we can't use red, green, and blue,
because if we did and we combined them,
we would get a mess.
Instead, when it comes to printing,
we have to use cyan, magenta, yellow, and black,
and the mixture of those allows us
to reproduce what we see on the screen onto paper.
This is because when we're doing it on a display,
it's considered an additive process,
but when we're doing it on our printer,
we're using a subtractive process.
So what you're seeing in the final printout
is actually a result of subtracting color using this process
and translation process instead
of adding additional colors like we do in a display.
When it comes to page description languages,
there are two main variants out there
that you should be aware of.
These are known as PCL and PostScript.
PCL is known as the printer control language
and it was developed by HP,
which is the Hewlett-Packer corporation.
PCL is closely tied to the individual features
of your different printer models
and gives you a lot more capability than its competitor,
which is known as PostScript.
PCL is a proprietary format from HP,
but it is used by lots of other manufacturers as well
under license from Hewlett-Packard.
Most printers will support PCL as well as PostScript.
PostScript, on the other hand, was created by Adobe.
PostScript was designed to be a device independent
page description language.
Where PCL was very closely tied
to the exact printer model that was being supported,
PostScript was more of a generic thing
that could be used on any printer.
The reason why PostScript came about
from Adobe is because they built a lot
of professional desktop publishing
and graphical design output programs like Adobe Photoshop
and Adobe PageMaker,
and they wanted to make sure that what you saw on the screen
actually matched up with what you printed out.
So they created PostScript as a page description language
that could be supported by every model of printer,
and they released it for all printer manufacturers
to use because by doing that,
all the outputs from their desktop publishing software
was looking great no matter what printer you
as an end user were using.
These days, in addition to PCL and PostScript,
you may also see XPS and PDF being used.
On Windows machines,
most print devices are going to default
to Microsoft's own standard, which is known as XPS.
XPS is another page description language,
and this stands for the XML paper specification.
XPS even has a virtual printer option where you can print
to this virtual XPS printer
and it will save a file in that format.
Then later when you get to a printer,
you can open that file and print it out
and it will look the exact same,
no matter what printer you use.
Now the main competitor to an XPS file is a PDF file.
A PDF file stands for portable document format,
and this was originally created by Adobe as well,
just like PostScript.
PDF allowed you to save a document to this PDF format
and no matter what system was looking at it,
reading it, or printing it,
it would all look and act the exact same.
That's the benefit of a PDF.
The biggest downside to a PDF is that PDFs tend
to be larger in size than XPS format files
and XPS format files are newer than PDFs,
so they have a couple of additional features
and they have increased compression
over a standard PDF file.
I know that was a lot of information about printer drivers.
What are the things you need to remember
when it comes to printer drivers?
First, anytime you install a printer,
you also need to install the appropriate driver.
The driver is installed on your system based on the model
of printer you have and the operating system you're using
so your operating system will know how to talk
to that specific model of printer.
In addition to that,
we have two generic formats that are out there known
as PCL and PostScript,
and these are both page description languages
that help do the translation
from what you see on the screen
to what you'll see when you print out that page.
And third, when it comes to virtual printers,
there are really two main specifications out there.
XPS and PDF.