Printers

[renatoerp]

Hi.

 

How printers prints documents? For example: The Microsoft Word sends a document for the printer and the printer prints it. I'd like to know how the printer knows how print (About the formatting for example, how color to print).

[Sayonara]

Read about PostScript and PCL.

 

Basically, they are industry standards used by most commercial printers for specifying printed page layouts.

[Pangloss]

Fascinating subjects, too. PostScript is actually a Turing-complete programming language, and it addressed a really interesting computer engineering problem back in the day.

[YT2095]

for Color printing such as a picture, it`s important to know a little bit of the fundamentals of printer and computer architecture.

essentially if you can imagine a sheet of graph paper, each square on that paper has a known location an Address, and inside each square we can put in information Data.

that Data (in an 8 bit system) can hold any number between 0 and 255, this can be used to represent a specific color or shade.

on a Monitor it`s called a Pixel.

so now you have your picture made up of a grid of different colors (a bit like the little dots seen in Newsprint).

of course this is done on a Very tiny scale 100`s of dots (addresses with data in) per inch, that make up a picture