With high-volume printers, engine speed is but one measurement used and the software that comes with it are also important considerations, ones that play a key role in determining a machine’s ability to take full advantage of ifs engine speed. To this end, most printers are flexible enough to accept print jobs in a variety of different formats and convert them on the fly to a printable image. This helps minimize time-consuming conversions and opens up the machine to a wider range of uses. With an increasing number of models, the controller is also able to combine pages in different formats to make up a single Job.
Within the high-volume printer market, you can expect to encounter a broad range of file formats and data streams. Some of the more common ones are described below.
Back-Office Printers
These are the formats and data streams typically found and printers that work with mainframes and minicomputers.
ASCII
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is the most common format for text tiles on most computers. In an ASCII file, each alphabetic, numeric, or special character is represented with a seven digit binary number (a string of seven Os and or 1’s). ASCII files contain very little formatting information (only such items as tabs, new line, and new page) and are printed with the printers default font. The format is best suited for raw data, such as back-office computer reports.
AFP
IBM’s AFP (Advanced Function Presentation, formerly Advanced Function Printing) is used for delivering printed documents that have been created on a mainframe or minicomputer. Typically, the documents have been composed in a manner such that their output is suitable only for a simple line printer. The Print Services Facility converts the composed data stream to a printer-specific data stream (IPDS or AFP/IPDS), AFP is best used for printing text pages and forms.
IPDS
IPDS (Intelligent Printer Data Stream) is a data stream standard invented by IBM in the 1980. for mainframe communication with laser printers. It contains the information necessary to control and monitor the functions of the printer (such as Its resolution, What resources it has, whether it has sufficient memory, and whether it receives and prints a job). IPDS enables two-way communication between the printer and the printer driver to create a cooperative print-management system. IPDS is a device dependent and can be unique for each printer.
DJDE
DJDE (Dynamic Job Description Entries) is a Xerox Standard for Inserting print control statements. These
are commands that are embedded by an application inside a print job that give instructions to the printer for
modifying the format and layout of the job. DJDE’s commands are used to start a new page, change fonts, and so on, although its capabilities are limited in scope. DJDE commands are often embedded in Metacode.
Metacode
Metacode is a page description language invented by Xerox for defining laser printer jobs. It works by embedding certain codes (metacode) into files that determine the formatting of the output. Metacode can precisely position graphical objects on the page. DJDE commands are often embedded in Metacode.
LCDS
LCDS (Line Conditioned Data Stream) Is a Xerox-originated print stream format. It is generally used to print data from mainframe computers. LCDS data streams sometimes contain Metacode.
LPR
LPR (Line Printer) is a protocol for defining Unix-based data streams to a print spooler or server. Because LPR is not well defined, it’s very possible for vendors to ship mutually incompatible implementations. LPR, as its name implies, has a very simple approach to page layout (that is, line by line) It is suitable only for simple text output.
High Volume Printers
These formats are more commonly found on models that address the on-demand and high-volume printing and publishing segments of the printer market.
PCL
PCL (Printer Control Language) is the printer command language by Hewlett Packard that has become standard for office laser printing. The computer sends commands to the printer one at a time — print this, print that, print this, and so forth. It’s a Windows centric printer language, so a printer equipped only with PCL won’t be able to work with MAC. The latest version of PCL is PCL6.
Postscript
PostScript, which was invented by Adobe Systems is the standard page description language for high end graphics and page layout programs. With this language, the computer sends the full description of the page to the printer all at once (instead of peppering it with discrete line commands as PCL does.
Postscript is device-independent, meaning that print files can (within limits) be resolved at different resolutions. PS printers are generally MAC-compatible, and Postscript is the language of choice for high-end graphic applications. The latest version is PSIII.
PDF
PDF (Portable Document Format) is another file format created by Adobe Systems. Among its many strengths are its ability to preserve the geometry and typography of pages as they were originally conceived and its universal portability. For example, PDF files can be created on one computer and opened on another with no changes to the basic look and construction; they can even go from a Macintosh to a PC and back again. Subject to resolution limits, they also print the same way on every printer. PDF has become a standard for exchanging files over the Internet and for archiving files though they cannot be easily edited.
TIFF
TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is a standard for describing various kinds of bitmapped files. TIFF files are resolution-dependent, so they can be difficult to convert from one machine to another, especially if a higher
Resolution is needed. They also can be very large, unless some kind of data compression is used. On the other hand, they are easy t~ print, since they don’t have to be rendered like PostScript files. Most copiers and scanners store scanned images as TIFFs.
VIPP
VIPP (Variable Data Intelligent PostScript PrintWare) is a PostScript-based language created by Xerox. It is used for the definition of variable Information contained in documents. VIPP is unique in that it enables file composition as the job is being rasterized, so there is no need to return to the authoring application for late changes. It is used principally in the formatting and printing of forms containing a variety of data sourced from fixed fields or database records. V1PP can be programmed to make queries to a wide variety of databases over the network to extract data for document creation. VIPP also makes use of programmable Job Descriptor Tickets (JDTs), which are printer resources used to control the placement of variable data and graphics on a form and to specify data attributes such as font size, rotation, field color, and print direction.
XML
XML (Extended Markup Language) is becoming a standard for sharing formatted data on the Internet. Among other uses, XML can provide formatting for printing. XML is similar to the language of today’s Web pages, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Both XML and HTML contain markup symbols to describe the contents of a page or file. XML is “extensible” because, unlike HTML, the markup symbols can be defined by users. Note that XML printing has not caught on in a big way.
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