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Printer: Impact Printers. Early Impact Printers Worked Something Like An Automatic

A printer is a device that transfers text and graphics from a computer to paper. Printers vary in cost, speed, and capabilities. Personal computer printers are either impact printers, which use physical contact to print, or non-impact printers like inkjet and laser printers, which spray or fuse small droplets of ink without contact. Key printer qualities are color printing ability, resolution, printing speed, and memory capacity. Common printer connections are parallel and USB ports, while popular printer languages are Postscript and PCL. Printers use resident or downloaded fonts in bitmap or outline formats.

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81 views

Printer: Impact Printers. Early Impact Printers Worked Something Like An Automatic

A printer is a device that transfers text and graphics from a computer to paper. Printers vary in cost, speed, and capabilities. Personal computer printers are either impact printers, which use physical contact to print, or non-impact printers like inkjet and laser printers, which spray or fuse small droplets of ink without contact. Key printer qualities are color printing ability, resolution, printing speed, and memory capacity. Common printer connections are parallel and USB ports, while popular printer languages are Postscript and PCL. Printers use resident or downloaded fonts in bitmap or outline formats.

Uploaded by

Abdul Rashid
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Printer

 TechTarget Contributor

A printer is a device that accepts text and graphic output from a computer and
transfers the information to paper, usually to standard size sheets of paper.
Printers vary in size, speed, sophistication, and cost. In general, more
expensive printers are used for higher-resolution color printing.

Personal computer printers can be distinguished as impact or non-


impact printers. Early impact printers worked something like an automatic
typewriter, with a key striking an inked impression on paper for each
printed character. The dot-matrix printer was a popular low-cost personal
computer printer. It's an impact printer that strikes the paper a line at a time.
The best-known non-impact printers are the inkjet printer, of which several
makes of low-cost color printers are an example, and the laser printer. The
inkjet sprays ink from an ink cartridge at very close range to the paper as it
rolls by. The laser printer uses a laser beam reflected from a mirror to attract
ink (called toner ) to selected paper areas as a sheet rolls over a drum.

The four printer qualities of most interest to most users are:

 Color: Color is important for users who need to print pages for


presentations or maps and other pages where color is part of the
information. Color printers can also be set to print only in black-and-white.
Color printers are more expensive to operate since they use two ink
cartridges (one color and one black ink) that need to be replaced after a
certain number of pages. Users who don't have a specific need for color
and who print a lot of pages will find a black-and-white printer cheaper to
operate.
 Resolution: Printer resolution (the sharpness of text and images on
paper) is usually measured in dots per inch (dpi). Most inexpensive printers
provide sufficient resolution for most purposes at 600 dpi.

 Speed: If you do much printing, the speed of the printer becomes


important. Inexpensive printers print only about 3 to 6 sheets per minute.
Color printing is slower. More expensive printers are much faster.

 Memory: Most printers come with a small amount of memory (for


example, one megabyte) that can be expanded by the user. Having more
than the minimum amount of memory is helpful and faster when printing
out pages with large images or tables with lines around them (which the
printer treats as a large image).
Printer I/O Interfaces
The most common I/O interface for printers has been
the parallel Centronics interface with a 36- pin plug. In the future, however,
new printers and computers are likely to use a serial interface,
especially Universal Serial Bus or FireWire with a smaller and less
cumbersome plug.

Printer Languages
Printer languages are commands from the computer to the printer to tell the
printer how to format the document being printed. These commands manage
font size, graphics, compression of data sent to the printer, color, etc. The two
most popular printer languages are Postscript and Printer Control Language.

Postscript is a printer language that uses English phrases and programmatic


constructions to describe the appearance of a printed page to the printer. This
printer language was developed by Adobe in 1985. It introduced new features
such as outline fonts and vector graphics. Printers now come from the factory
with or can be loaded with Postscript support. Postscript is not restricted to
printers. It can be used with any device that creates an image using dots such
as screen displays, slide recorders, and image setters.
PCL (Printer Command Language) is an escape code language used to send
commands to the printer for printing documents. Escape code language is so-
called because the escape key begins the command sequence followed by a
series of code numbers. Hewlett Packard originally devised PCL for dot matrix
and inkjet printers. Since its introduction, it has become an industry standard.
Other manufacturers who sell HP clones have copied it. Some of these clones
are very good, but there are small differences in the way they print a page
compared to real HP printers. In 1984, the original HP Laserjet printer was
introduced using PCL. PCL helped change the appearance of low-cost printer
documents from poor to exceptional quality.

Fonts
A font is a set of characters of a specific style and size within an
overall typeface design. Printers use resident fonts and soft fonts to print
documents. Resident fonts are built into the hardware of a printer. They are
also called internal fonts or built-in fonts. All printers come with one or more
resident fonts. Additional fonts can be added by inserting a font cartridge into
the printer or installing soft fonts to the hard drive. Resident fonts cannot be
erased unlike soft fonts. Soft fonts are installed onto the hard drive and then
sent to the computer's memory when a document is printed that uses the
particular soft font. Soft fonts can be purchased in stores or downloaded from
the Internet.

There are two types of fonts used by the printer and screen
display, bitmap fonts and outline fonts. Bitmap fonts are digital representations
of fonts that are not scalable. This means they have a set size or a limited set
of sizes. For example, if a document using a bitmap font sized to 24 point is
sent to the printer and there is not a bitmap font of that size, the computer will
try to guess the right size. This results in the text looking stretched-out or
squashed. Jagged edges are also a problem with bitmap fonts. Outline fonts
are mathematical descriptions of the font that are sent to the printer. The
printer then rasterizes (see raster graphics) or converts them to the dots that
are printed on the paper. Because they are mathematical, they are scalable.
This means the size of the font can be changed without losing the sharpness
or resolution of the printed text. TrueType and Type 1 fonts are outline fonts.
Outline fonts are used with Postscript and PCL printer languages.

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