Specifications

The more flexible your printing needs, the less likely it is that a host-based printer can meet them. If
you plan to use nothing but Windows or Macintosh as an environment, a host-based printer might
suffice. Choose carefully.
Note
If you are looking for a printer that will work with both Windows and Linux, don’t buy anything until you check out the
Linux printer-compatibility database located at www.linuxprinting.org.
You’ll also find news about Linux printer support and links to leading Linux printer drivers, such as Ghostscript, stp, and
others.
You will find that host-based printers are more difficult to use with Linux than printers that use a true PDL.
Printer Memory
Printers have memory chips in them just as PCs do, and laser and inkjet printers usually have a
processor as well, making the printer a computer unto itself—albeit a highly specialized one. Printers
can use their internal memory for several purposes: as a buffer to hold print job data while it is being
fed to the actual print engine; as a workspace to hold data during the processing of images, fonts, and
commands; and as permanent and semipermanent storage for outline fonts and other data.
For a page printer (laser or LED), the amount of memory onboard is an extremely important gauge of
its capabilities. The printer must be capable of assembling a bitmap image of an entire page to print it,
and the graphic images and fonts that are used on that page all take up memory. Even vector graphics
and outline fonts must be processed into bitmaps before they can be printed. The larger the graphics
on the page and the more fonts used, the more memory is required. This is in addition to the mem-
ory necessary to store the PDL interpreter and the printer’s permanent fonts.
You might find that your printer has sufficient memory to print an average page of mixed text and
graphics but not enough to print a full-page graphic or a page with many fonts. The result of this
might be a graphic split in half over two pages (a problem sometimes referred to as guillotining), miss-
ing fonts, or even no output at all. Fortunately, most printers can accept additional memory to extend
their capabilities.
Expansion memory for printers can come in many forms. Some printers use standard memory mod-
ules, such as SIMMs or DIMMs, whereas others use proprietary designs you must purchase from the
manufacturer (at an inflated price, of course). As with a PC, extra memory installed in a printer is
almost never wasted. In addition to the capability of processing larger graphics and more fonts, print-
ers might be capable of using extra memory to process the data for one page while printing another
and to buffer larger amounts of data received from the PC.
Tip
Because many laser printers use data-compression techniques to print graphics with a small amount of memory, some laser
printers print graphics-rich pages much more quickly after a memory upgrade. This is because the printer needs to spend
less time calculating whether the page will fit into memory and little or no time compressing the data to fit.
If you add memory to your laser printer, make sure you adjust the driver properties for the laser printer to reflect the addi-
tional memory so your software will take advantage of it. See your printer manual for details.
A printer with additional memory can accept more data from the PC at one time. Depending on your
PC’s operating system and its printer driver configuration, this can result in a noticeable difference in
your system’s performance. When you print a document in a DOS application, you cannot proceed