· How to pick the right printer driver

Both Adobe's PS and HP's PCL drivers are page desciption languages. This means they are both languages that describe how to print a page. Each has its own positive and negative qualities, and they are good for different things.

PCL drivers do most of the rendering on the local workstation and the information is sent in essentially binary form to printer. Postscript drivers essentially send a page description to the printers where it is rendered. Since local workstations are generally MUCH faster than the printers, PCL printing is much faster than postscript and because it requires less printer memory some jobs may only print if sent using PCL drivers. However, PCL is also a simpler language than Postscript so it lacks many of the complex drawing and scaling functions that are available in Postscript. Therefore, if you are using a package which takes advantage of postscript's capabilities (e.g. most Adobe products and some others), you may get better quality output using postscript drivers and your complex print job may not print properly or at all using the PCL driver.

If your file is not printing correctly using one driver, go ahead and try the other. That's one of the first things we'll try when we visit your station.

Some Printers in the COF have both PCL and PS drivers available. A Postscript print queue, usually has a "-ps" appended at the end of the queue name. Choose your driver based on the guidelines above or call the helpdesk for a recommendation.

How to Pick the Right Printer Driver