Best Postscript Printer Driver

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Best Ps Printer Driver
Postscript Printer Driver For Xp
Postscript Printer Driver Install

To install a printer that uses a PostScript driver, do one of the following tasks: Choose > Start > Printers and Faxes > Add Printer, and then follow the on-screen instructions to install a PostScript printer.

When printing, you might have come across the word “Postscript.” Ever wondered what the heck this means, and relevance it has to your printer? Take a minute, learn some computer history, and a little bit more about desktop printers work.

Unless you’re a computer scientist, it can be confusing to look up “Postscript” and learn that it’s a “concatenative programming language” only to find you have even more confusing words to look up. Today, we’ll make it easy, and put Postscript into context, explain what it is, why and how it does what it does, and how it pretty much turned the whole graphics world on its collective ear! Keep reading, there’s some good geeky fun stuff ahead.

ASCII, Dot Matrix, Plotters, and Changing Printed Graphics

Microsoft PostScript Printer Driver.; 2 minutes to read Contributors. In this article. The PostScript Printer Driver (Pscript) is the Microsoft corporation standard printer driver for PostScript printers. Adobe postscript printer driver free download - Adobe Universal PostScript Printer Driver, DL Driver Updater, HP Multiple Product Adobe PostScript Printer Driver, and many more programs. Microsoft PostScript Printer Driver.; 2 minutes to read Contributors. In this article. The PostScript Printer Driver (Pscript) is the Microsoft corporation standard printer driver for PostScript printers. Install the AdobePS printer driver to create PostScript and printer files in Windows applications.

Download the latest driver, firmware, and software for your HP Universal Print Driver for Windows.This is HP's official website to download drivers free of cost for your HP Computing and Printing products for Windows and Mac operating system.
Learn which printers can use the Universal Print Driver (UPD) for Windows. And PostScript-emulation (PS). HP provides best effort support for PCL5 in the HP.

Before we understand Postscript and more modern printing devices, we have to consider the humble roots of PC to print technology. Early computer printers were crude devices made only to reproduce text and ASCII characters—there was little to no application of graphics, and little to no use for them. These so called “dumb” printers could be programmed to produce text, although many would have had hardware limitations that would stop them from printing anything but the characters in the hardware—think “typewriter.”

Some of us at How-To Geek might date ourselves and say we remember an important next step in printer evolution—dot matrix printers. These were capable of printing some crude grayscale graphics with rows of pixels, as well as blocky, low pixel depth typography. Although they did have the advantage of creating digital images (although ASCII art sort of counts), the crude typography was a setback for early dot matrix printers. All dot matrix printers took directions on printing images and text in roughly the same way; break it into pixels, printing them in rows as the print head passes along the paper, feed the next bit of paper, and repeat.

Unlike dot matrix printers, plotters are still fairly common, particularly in manufacturing. Plotters move papers, vinyl, or various other materials around on algebraic coordinates to draw, print, or cut smooth, mathematically pure vector shapes with a stylus or knife blade. As we’ve learned, because of the nature of typographic glyphs, vector shapes are vastly superior to pixels for defining abstract, mathematically pure shapes found in type. Because plotters are engineered to move around based on precise math, the instructions on how to create typography and other shapes are fairly easy for a PC to communicate to the device.

The challenge was this: no existing model of PC to print technology could create vector-based, clean typography AND graphics at the same time. What were all the clever geeks supposed to do?

Xerox PARC, and Development Of The First Laser Printer

Xerography, AKA photocopying, was the development printers were looking for. Although Xerography had been invented in the thirties and made commercially available as copy machines in the late fifties and sixties, it wasn’t used in PC printing until Xerox PARC engineer Gary Starkweather designed the first laser printer.

Here’s a graphic and a rough descriptions of how Xerography works: light hits electrically charged areas of the printing drum, the electrons react and those negatively charged areas lose that charge. Toner adheres to the static electricity, and is pressed onto the paper, creating artwork without the use of dot matrix style pixels. And because this printing process was fundamentally different from any of the comparatively crude methods listed above, Xerography was a logical way to print clean type and graphics at the same time. There was one simple engineering problem that had to be solved—how do you create instructions for a printer that can easily do both at once?

The Best of Both Worlds: Postscript is the Print Whisperer

Enter Adobe engineers and co-founders John Warnock and Charles Geschke. The pair had worked together at Xerox and had created page description language (or PDL) called Interpress. Interpress solved this engineering problem—it was a system of translating images and complicated shapes into data the printer can use to turn out high quality printed artwork. Interpress was not necessarily the first PDL, and it wasn’t Warnock and Geschke’s last collaboration. Leaving Xerox PARC, the pair developed a flagship product in Postscript, which has remained, even to this day, a graphics industry standard.

Postscript, as the name sort of suggests, is actually a Turing-complete programming language. Directions are written out in a human-readable way, and communicated to the printer, which creates the high quality art from the instructions. Here’s a sample “Hello World” program from Inkguides.com.

%!PS
/inch {72 mul} def
/Times-Roman findfont 50 scalefont setfont
2.5 inch 5 inch moveto
(Hello, World!) show
showpage

We start to see pretty quickly what kind of instructions Postscript is giving the printer, and just how simple the directions are. Fonts referenced in this program exist in vector form and are called up from separate files—and were a big part of Adobe’s contribution to the digital graphics industry. Here’s a second example, from Mikkel Meinike Nielsen’s page on Postscript:

%!
/Times-Roman findfont 16 scalefont setfont
gsave %save before using translate
105 210 translate %This cordinates places the images on
%the page
%————-The actual image begin———————
76.8 86.4 scale
40 45 1 [ 40 0 0 -45 0 45 ]
{ <
fffff5ffffffffdeffffffffeaffffffffdeffffffffffffffffffeeffff
fffffefffffffffbffffffffffffffffffccffffffff77bffffffeffdfff
fffdfff7fffffbfff7fffff77ffbffff5ebfbdfffafdbf7ebffbf3ff6fdf
e9ef7ff7f3d6bfff7d55afff7efffafffffffffcffff7efffffffef7ffff
fffdf77fffffffeffffffffdf7bffffffbd7bfffffffbffffffff7fbbfff
ffef7bffffffeefbdfffffdef7bfffffffffbfffffbdefffffff7dff7fff
ff7bdffffffff7ff7ffff977e57ffffa5ffbffffff7feebffffdbff4bfff
ff7fffffffffffffffffffffffffff> } image
%————-The actual image end ———————
grestore %restore the settings from before the translat
0 245 moveto (Text and image, ) show
0 229 moveto (side by side. ) show
showpage

This large middle section of gobbledygook is actually hexadecimal code that defines an image. Most Postscript isn’t written by hand like this, but rather by programs. To get an idea of what this Postscript code actually looks like, take a look at this screencap from Mikkel’s page below of the image this code generated. Entire photographic mages can also be re-written as postscript this way—the filetype is called Encapsulated Post Script, or EPS.

Modern Printed Pages and Newer Printing Processes

Nowadays, not all printers use Postscript, but all of them have to have some kind of translation layer to turn text and image data into printed material. We usually call these programs printer drivers—and nowadays they come from the manufacturer, and are a proprietary software. In some form or fashion, this Is an crucial piece of what all printers need to communicate with PCs—even though the printers we use in our homes are solving very different problems than the first laser printers. Regardless, Postscript was Adobe’s first big success, and is part of what effectively the start of a worldwide popular explosion of graphics and design.

Image Credits: Brother Printer MFC-8370 by Jung-nam Nam, available under Creative Commons. Ancient Dot Matrix Printer by Andy Broomfield, available under Creative Commons. IBM 3800, photographer unknown, assumed fair use. Xerographic Photocopy process by Yzmo, available under GNU license. Adobe software by Seven Block, available under Creative Commons. The new printer by Erin Sparling, available under Creative Commons.

closed as primarily opinion-based by Sven♦Aug 5 '15 at 14:59

Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise. If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.

9 Answers

It's so amazing and horrifying when a thread like this has all sorts of non-knowledge and non-answers flowing in it and no answer gets it right.

First I'll give my own answer then I'll explain where the previous posters are wrong.

You should go with PCL 6. Here's why: You don't need PostScript. If you did need it you would know it and you wouldn't be asking this question. PostScript is more problematic than is PCL, so if you don't need it it's better avoided. It's more problematic in these ways and more: harder to find drivers (for a Win ME computer for example), more resource hungry (both on the printer, the workstation, and the network), HP's PostScript drivers are going to be much buggier than their PCL drivers, the quality of HP's PostScript emulation (that is, a third-party clone of Adobe's PostScript program) is highly questionable whereas the PCL is an HP product and therefore a better risk, PostScript tends to throw obscure errors when printing and requires obscure expertise to troubleshoot (very frustrating)-PCL does this less, PostScript tends to run the printer out of memory easier, PostScript drivers offer lots of obscure settings that are useful only to industry pros (like color separations, e.g.) and will only confuse normal people and give them more ways to cause themselves problems, and on difficult prints PostScript will often be slower. All that off the top of my head.

PCL6 is a powerful page description language and will do anything you ever need to do. Quality is not an issue, PCL works fine and can print the same vector graphics and vector fonts as can PostScript. Photos and other bit mapped graphics are outside the realm of PostScript's power and thus the two languages will print them the same, except that PostScript will render the photo in text and blow up its binary size, thus taking longer to download it to the printer (it has to do this because PostScript is a language of text, there is nothing binary there. Everything is rendered into text characters).

PostScript offers many advantages, but mostly to printing industry pros. An example is that if you want to print something on a super-high resolution image setter at some local high end printing shop they will likely accept the file only in Adobe Photoshop or PostScript formats, thus if you are using the PostScript driver you have a way to make such a file. However, PDF format can be used now in many situations where PostScript was formerly required. PostScript drivers do tend to offer more features than the PCL driver and some may be useful to you (like Booklet printing e.g.) but at this late date and age it's more likely that the PCL driver offers everything you would ever need, and the PostScript driver may not offer much at all extra that you could use.

Mark Henderson♦

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user61475user61475

The issue between PCL and PostScript is very specific to which software and printer combination is used. On some printers, PCL is better than PostScript and on others, the reverse applies. Some printers like the HP LaserJet 5 Color (and many others) have an add-on module that fits in one of the SIMM slots that provides PostScript support. Yet other printers have factory built-in support. Sending a PostScript file to the printer produces fairly high quality output that is very predictable. On the other hand, the software on the PC/MAC/X-computer (or whatever the source of the PostScript is) becomes the wild card here. At some point, there has to be a conversion from whatever your document is to PostScript (unless the document is already in PostScript, and even in this case there are issues). This conversion to PostScript is a HUGE problem. Some software (usually Windows printer drivers) simply convert whatever document that you have to a bitmap and embed the bitmap in a PostScript file and sends this to the printer. This is a huge waste of space in all respects, and it completely goes around whatever advantage that PostScript offers. PostScript is a layout language that can layout vector and bitmap items. If you have a text document, the location of the text, font, and other details are described, and the raw text is sent to the printer. The PostScript engine in the printer is aware if the physical layout of the printer and renders the output in a way that is likely to produce good output taking the actual printer hardware into account. If your printer driver takes whatever text is in your document and renders this as a bitmap and then puts this bitmap into a PostScript file, then your printer is simply printing a bitmap. This creates a problem: When you are printing bitmaps there are specific optimisations that the printer will use to make bitmaps look nice, in most cases, these optimisations are different than the ones that will be used for text, so the end result is usually non optimal.So to make sense of everything, the following issues have to be considered:

How good is the software that converts your document to PCL or PostScript?
How good is the PCL or PostScript support of your printer?
Which combination works best for my specific computer/printer combination.

The answers for these questions is quite often not black or white. And to make things worse, some printers that have poor PCL quality might actually make nicer looking documents in PCL because the PCL converter on the computer puts in specific fixups or work-arounds for problems with PCL on a specific printer, or the reverse with PostScript.

Then there is yet another issue.. Some printers claim to support PostScript, and in reality, there is no PostScript support whatsoever! The printer vendors claim support for PostScript based on that their printer driver that runs on the computer can convert PostScript to whatever language the printer speaks!

My personal approach is to use PostScript when ever possible. Generally, I won't buy a printer unless I know it has good support for PostScript, and I am talking about the actual printer, not about software that runs on the PC to convert PostScript to some other format that the printer uses. PostScript is a well established standard format, that is going to be around for a while, and sending the EXACT same postscript file to any random printer that supports PostScript is likely to produce acceptable output. The down side to this is that such printers are usually more expensive, and require more memory than other methods. However the price is well worth the time saved fighting with drivers, and also, if there is a problem with the PostScript converter on the PC side, it is ONE thing to fix and the fix works on every printer.

You could probably do the same thing with PCL, but this is not as clean as doing things with PostScript because PCL usually involves printer specific commands and sending the same PCL file to different printers is more likely to produce the wrong results than with PostScript. Also, some PCL drivers tend to have huge libraries of work-arounds that are printer specific, so it is not so easy to sent the same PCL file to different printers and expect the same output. This also means that if you have a very old PCL printer, who ever made the printer is less likely to release fixes for the older printers, and only issue PCL fixes for later models. This is generally not the case with PostScript, as a single fix to the PostScript software would effect all printers regardless of who made them or their age.

There have been other posts to this thread that are wrong:First off, True Type fonts are vector (outline) fonts, very similar to Type1 (which are also vector fonts) but with the ability for the author to hand code pixel hints. This generally makes True Type fonts look better than Type1 fonts under certain conditions. It all comes down to the quality of the software that renders the fonts more than the actual format of the font. I have seen True Type font software that is so badly designed that it renders the fonts at a fixed size and then scales the output for display. It all comes down to the quality of the rendering software much more than the format that the font is in. (This only applies to vector/outline fonts, bitmap fonts are an entirely different issue.)

The point here is that PCL and PostScript are both standards that many printer manufacturers have adopted. Depending on how well the manufacture wrote the specific implementation will determine how well the printer will work with a given standard. There are also many proprietary printer languages that are printer specific. In my opinion, non standard printer languages are to be completely avoided when ever possible! The reason is that non standard languages are often not documented, and when the company comes up with a new one, support for the old one is likely to be discontinued. So when you upgrade or change the OS on your computer and there is no driver that works with your printer/OS combination, you now have a door stop. One other reason is that nobody has ever been able to demonstrate that a proprietary printer language has any real printing quality advantage over PCL or PostScript, so there is no reason whatsoever other than saving hardware cost on the printer, which now days is pointless because computing power is so cheap.

sysadmin1138♦

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NeilNeil

To me this depends on a couple of things:

Does the printer support native PostScript. Many printers only have PostScript emulation. The actual printing engine does not 'think' in PostScript and so you lose some definition in comparison to a true PostScript printer. A lot of HP printers (not sure about the 2605) only do emulation.
Do your users need PostScript? If they are printing mostly office documents (Word, Excel) PCL will be the best. There are normally far fewer options on a PCL driver, which makes it simpler for an enduser. If your users are printing out graphical presentations or lots of pictures and are very picky about the final product, then I would go with a PostScript driver, but only if it is a true PostScript printer..

In short, I would test to see which works the best in your environment.

Scott LundbergScott Lundberg

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For one or a small number of computers I normally go PCL, but if output speed, quality, or printer functionality (eg stapler) is important then I always do test prints to compare. For example colours or logos on letterheads may be rendered better with a particular driver. Speed may also be an issue if the printer is going to get heavier use on complex/long documents.

WilliamWilliam

It does really depend on what you're printing. One answer said to use Postscript because it has better fonts. That may be true if you're only printing text documents but if you're printing mixed jobs that have both text and graphics PCL6 may be better. Print and compare the difference. Personally, I usually go with PCL6 first, then PCL5 then Postscript.

Are you using the driver provided with Windows 7 or are you using the driver from HP.com? Windows in-box drivers usually only have a subset of features. You're almost always better off downloading the drivers from HP.com. The latest drivers for the CLJ 2605dtn for Win7 64-bit are at http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodNameId=1140732&prodTypeId=18972&prodSeriesId=1140727&swLang=8&taskId=135&swEnvOID=4063. In this case, you'd be using the 'Universal Print Driver' which supports many other HP printers including the CLJ 2605dtn.

Paul LeclercPaul Leclerc

Rule of thumb: PCL should cause less problems for the average user. However, it is causing problems with certain PDF documents we are printing, unless pains are taken to adjust advanced printer settings (ie..'send true type as bit image'; disable print optimization)when it happens. The adjustments don't always work. Adobe PDF is apparently a PS oriented document--PCL drivers create HUGE files during conversion which in our case overload the memory or jam our network.

In a search for a solution I learned that some people load both PS and PCL drivers specifically to use with problematic PDF documents.

This is a real life illustration of what many are saying--depends on many factors. This is one.

CallMeChazCallMeChaz

On an HP printer, a PCL driver (either 5 or 6) will likely work the best. The intrepreters on a HP device handle PCL much better than PS [they developed the language, so they better!]. If you are just doing regular windows printing then PCL6 would be my suggestion.

The PS interpreters on HP devices are not great and I would generally avoid it. Other types of printers (Xerox for example) handle PS better than PCL. So it always depends on the printer and what you are trying to acheive. Both languages have pros and cons.

CitizenNickCitizenNick

I have an HP Inkjet that won't print pdf with pcl5 or pcl6, but will print word and excel with postscript. I know this because I just spent 3 hours trying all the different combinations of drivers and documents.

Best Ps Printer Driver

I can add to that by noting that a generic Linux inkjet driver on my FC20 box just happened to be postscript and was able to print pdf, while the Windows 10 pcl6 driver couldn't.

Thus in my case, with my specific printer, the postscript driver is clearly the best.

Postscript Printer Driver For Xp

However, as you can see from all the other comments, the 'complete' answer is somewhat more elusive.

I think it very much depends on the printer and you'll just have to try all the offered drivers and see which works best.

MartinMartin

PostScript is Far superior to any other font type. since a PostScript fonts are Vector based meaning that there is an algorithm for every character and a drawing. This makes the Fonts superior because Fonts like TT fonts are Dot based rather than equation based..

And If a printer supports a PCL does not mean you can print PostScript unless it clearly states that it supports it..

Postscript Printer Driver Install

The clear and easy test are when a printer supports 1200dpi, you would select the smallest font size and print a page in postscript and a page in PCL you can clearly tell each character individually also, you can test it out the sameway by extending the Font size to a VERY large scale.. there, you can see dots in the corner of letters such as S, or J , or even D. you would not see the Ugly dots in postscript.

For printing documents PCL fonts are enough.

sreevatsa

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