Why isn't there a universal printer driver
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Russell Jones wrote:
rather than installing a huge stack of software
Just install the driver. I don't install any of the crapware that comes with a printer (HP is the biggest culprit in this area.
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001I fully agree but often you have to install the crapware just to get the driver out of the package. VMs have helped a lot here :-) I remember working as a tech supporting home workers with multi function printers and going spare that every time we had to buy a new printer HP would have changed the drivers for their machines and we'd have to tweak the images that we had for building new PCs yet again (not to mention the change in cartridge spec every time a new printer came out)
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MS writes universal drivers that provide basic functionality for lots of other devices, so I'm wondering if there's a reason why they can't do the same for printers to end the unending driver problems with older printers and newer versions of windows. I, vaguely, recall something like this existing in the DOS era, but dot matrix printers were much simpler than today's inkjet/laser printers.
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I think that was the intention of postscript. Sadly there's a lot more to driving modern printers than just saying "dump this document to my parallel port"
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
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ragnaroknrol wrote:
It would be nice if there were standards for a bunch of devices, but in the case of printers they were out long before the thought of doing such a thing existed. Each company does it their way and they won't switch.
The same was true of lots of other devices that now run on universal drivers because once they get good enough it becomes cheaper to implement to the reference driver and fire all your driver devs.
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Yes it becomes cheaper, but they are not able to have all the 'Cool new features' that make them stand out over the other brands. I would hate to miss out on the 'Scan your face to World of Warcraft' feature because they decided to use a universal driver. (no, I do not play World of Warcraft nor do I associate with people who do. ;P )
Developer
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Yes it becomes cheaper, but they are not able to have all the 'Cool new features' that make them stand out over the other brands. I would hate to miss out on the 'Scan your face to World of Warcraft' feature because they decided to use a universal driver. (no, I do not play World of Warcraft nor do I associate with people who do. ;P )
Developer
Doing that would only require firmware to scan objects that don't lie flat on the scanner surface and usermode bloatware to upload the image to the warcrack server. Actually sending the scanned image back to the client shouldn't be different than scaning anything else and sending an image back; meaning there's no reason the interconnect couldn't be done by a standard driver/API and you and I could simply not install the unneeded bloatware.
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It would be even nicer if the manufacturers of these devices had to provide a driver which started when you selected their printer rather than installing a huge stack of software that runs when windows boots and slows down the boot process. I know in the past users spent alot of their time creating documents with the intention of printing them out but most people nowadays print something out once in a blue moon, it's not worth paying the price at boot up every time I reboot to gain a couple of seconds time when i try to print a document. Strangely Linux which does most hardware very badly does printing really well. I never managed to install my current printer under XP because the download from HP was so huge that it was quicker to reboot in Linux and print there and I never remembered about the printer driver till I wanted to print something. Linux (Ubuntu Intrepid - Koala) has had no problems with it at all, never needed an aditional driver disk and always seems to print fine.
As a counter example, as of last November Epson only had a win7-64 driver for my printer, none of their client software would install. Annoying since at the time when I printed I could click the STFU there is too still ink left in the cartridge button and print anyway; wheras now it won't print at all and won't say which cart it thinks it out. I've been procrastinating on installing to my remaining XP box to see which one is out and which is half full because that info isn't provided outside of the tray app. The Epson tray app is very unbloated
HPlikein design, and either it installed separately from all the other garbage or it was easy enough to toss the rest of the junk that I don't ever recall doing it.3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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MS writes universal drivers that provide basic functionality for lots of other devices, so I'm wondering if there's a reason why they can't do the same for printers to end the unending driver problems with older printers and newer versions of windows. I, vaguely, recall something like this existing in the DOS era, but dot matrix printers were much simpler than today's inkjet/laser printers.
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There is. . . only it hasn't been made available to the desktop. When using terminal services (TS) based environments (remote desktop services / citrix), printing causes so many issues that a universal print driver was the only solution. Citrix has its Citrix Universal Print Driver, and MS have TS Easy Print. I'm not sure why those couldn't be made available to the stand alone client. . . maybe they could? There's a great artical about all the complexities of printing here; though it focusses on the TS context: http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2004/02/02/the-ultimate-guide-to-terminal-server-printing-design-and-configuration.aspx[^] With regards to the apps which take 10 mins to load in order to save you a second each time you print, it seems weird that a lazy load method isn't used; so that only in sessions where it's clear you wish to print at least once do you have to suffer the hit. I guess the logic is that it's less noticable if this cost's incurred on startup, but it would be nice to have the option.
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There is. . . only it hasn't been made available to the desktop. When using terminal services (TS) based environments (remote desktop services / citrix), printing causes so many issues that a universal print driver was the only solution. Citrix has its Citrix Universal Print Driver, and MS have TS Easy Print. I'm not sure why those couldn't be made available to the stand alone client. . . maybe they could? There's a great artical about all the complexities of printing here; though it focusses on the TS context: http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2004/02/02/the-ultimate-guide-to-terminal-server-printing-design-and-configuration.aspx[^] With regards to the apps which take 10 mins to load in order to save you a second each time you print, it seems weird that a lazy load method isn't used; so that only in sessions where it's clear you wish to print at least once do you have to suffer the hit. I guess the logic is that it's less noticable if this cost's incurred on startup, but it would be nice to have the option.
HP, and other Printer Manufacturers have their own version of a Universal Printer Driver I have tested the latest HP UPD 5.0.1 and it works with ANY HP printer commercially available- past and present- have tested with 10 year old PSC750 printers all the way up to Eedgelines and latest Colour LaserJet Multifunctions. Xerox make Universal Drivers based on their product families, as do KonicaMinolta and Ricoh The problem here is not that there is no such thing as a univeral driver- there is in Citrix and XenApp but not in a true desktop sense. We all know drivers run on PJL commands and then the breakdown of the rest of the driver files are encapsulated PCL5, PCL6 or PS- I find PCL5 faster, simpler and easier to work with (and create custom drivers). I have supported Printers and MFD's for 5 years and am fully conversant with vendors and manufacturers- and yes simply put you can any HP LaserJet Driver built into wondows and it will work 99% of the time on any printer, but when you want to staple, hole punch and perform page insertions and custom commands or create custom page sizes, then drivers and applications really struggle with UPD's.
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HP, and other Printer Manufacturers have their own version of a Universal Printer Driver I have tested the latest HP UPD 5.0.1 and it works with ANY HP printer commercially available- past and present- have tested with 10 year old PSC750 printers all the way up to Eedgelines and latest Colour LaserJet Multifunctions. Xerox make Universal Drivers based on their product families, as do KonicaMinolta and Ricoh The problem here is not that there is no such thing as a univeral driver- there is in Citrix and XenApp but not in a true desktop sense. We all know drivers run on PJL commands and then the breakdown of the rest of the driver files are encapsulated PCL5, PCL6 or PS- I find PCL5 faster, simpler and easier to work with (and create custom drivers). I have supported Printers and MFD's for 5 years and am fully conversant with vendors and manufacturers- and yes simply put you can any HP LaserJet Driver built into wondows and it will work 99% of the time on any printer, but when you want to staple, hole punch and perform page insertions and custom commands or create custom page sizes, then drivers and applications really struggle with UPD's.
Anthony Schubert wrote:
I have tested the latest HP UPD 5.0.1 and it works with ANY HP printer commercially available- past and present- have tested with 10 year old PSC750 printers all the way up to Eedgelines and latest Colour LaserJet Multifunctions.
Dare I ask how many terrabytes it needs to install? Based on HP's demonstrated engineering practices I'm expecting it to include a full copy of the gigabyte+ of bloat that is HP crapware for each of the hundreds of printers they've sold.
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HP, and other Printer Manufacturers have their own version of a Universal Printer Driver I have tested the latest HP UPD 5.0.1 and it works with ANY HP printer commercially available- past and present- have tested with 10 year old PSC750 printers all the way up to Eedgelines and latest Colour LaserJet Multifunctions. Xerox make Universal Drivers based on their product families, as do KonicaMinolta and Ricoh The problem here is not that there is no such thing as a univeral driver- there is in Citrix and XenApp but not in a true desktop sense. We all know drivers run on PJL commands and then the breakdown of the rest of the driver files are encapsulated PCL5, PCL6 or PS- I find PCL5 faster, simpler and easier to work with (and create custom drivers). I have supported Printers and MFD's for 5 years and am fully conversant with vendors and manufacturers- and yes simply put you can any HP LaserJet Driver built into wondows and it will work 99% of the time on any printer, but when you want to staple, hole punch and perform page insertions and custom commands or create custom page sizes, then drivers and applications really struggle with UPD's.
Anthony Schubert wrote:
and yes simply put you can any HP LaserJet Driver built into wondows and it will work 99% of the time on any printer,
This begs the question of why MS hasn't put a universal printer driver in windows even more. 99% of the driver complaints I've seen are with consumer models that don't have any of the fancy stuff that causes problems...
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Anthony Schubert wrote:
and yes simply put you can any HP LaserJet Driver built into wondows and it will work 99% of the time on any printer,
This begs the question of why MS hasn't put a universal printer driver in windows even more. 99% of the driver complaints I've seen are with consumer models that don't have any of the fancy stuff that causes problems...
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Samsung has a Universal Print Driver that should work on nearly any printer according to their website: http://www.samsung.com/us/upd/popup.html[^] Note the text where it says "The Samsung Universal Print Driver enables you to print to any Samsung device without having to install a driver for every networked printer. It is also compatible with any printer or multi-function printer (MFP) that utilizes PCL6 or PostScript languages, meaning a wide range of devices from different manufacturers can be accessed on the single driver."
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I think that was the intention of postscript. Sadly there's a lot more to driving modern printers than just saying "dump this document to my parallel port"
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
Actually, PostScript works quite well. Just about any decent printer supports it (with the exception of some specialty and low-end printers), Even more amusing, when using printers that talk PS in Linux, the "driver" is literally a text file that defines what the printer is capable of (PPD files)
I don't claim to be a know it all, for I know that I am not...
I usually have an answer though.
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Dan Neely wrote:
but dot matrix printers were much simpler than today's inkjet/laser printers.
You answered yourself. Leaving out weird letter sizes, tray preferences, and DPI settings you are still looking at a ton of info that is specific to the machine that has to be dealt with in a form the machine understands. HP and Epson use completely different systems to send this info to their printers and having looked at some of it for older printers vs new ones I can tell you HP has fairly different drivers even for printers in the same series. It would be nice if there were standards for a bunch of devices, but in the case of printers they were out long before the thought of doing such a thing existed. Each company does it their way and they won't switch.
actually HP does support PCL4,5 and 6 driver modes, granted a little more old school then some of the newer communication packages, but they work great. a few years ago (8), I had to build a general purpose HP print driver for some DOS apps (*bang head on desk). I went with the PCL stuff for HP because Epson was not supporting there DOS compatable communication package anymore. with the PCL at least, you could plug any printer from the cheap color to the older laser printers and not have it skip a beet. now get this, I made the prof of concept useing quickbasic (QBX) to get the OK, because it was faster to implement and then had to rebuild in c code which was fun in a way but I've never gone back to doing any thing in c/c++. the DOS days for the company I work for were finally over just after the driver was released. since then it's been nothing but VB.net :-D funny enough some of our customers are still hanging onto the old DOS stuff, still finding HP printers that have a parellel port with out much problem. I really do wish that all printer makers would agree on a minimum subset of codes to get the printer working, after that they can add on all they want.
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MS writes universal drivers that provide basic functionality for lots of other devices, so I'm wondering if there's a reason why they can't do the same for printers to end the unending driver problems with older printers and newer versions of windows. I, vaguely, recall something like this existing in the DOS era, but dot matrix printers were much simpler than today's inkjet/laser printers.
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As some of the above have answered there are several 'universal' printer drivers. By that I mean if the printer supports the particular standard you can just send it the file according to that standard and it will work. PCL is pretty common, but it's not really a universal standard and it has some nasty limitations - so I'll exclude it from this list. SGML - some big printing engines (used by short run publishing houses) directly support SGML. However finding the software for your PC to generate the SGML is another story. Don't try coding SGML yourself you'll go blind. Postscript - yep, does work. Except that a lot of the printer implementations require a Ctrl-D at the end of the file to get them going, plus a lot of other quirks. Programming in Postscript is another great way to mess with your head, or in some cases the printer if they don't really support Postscript properly. XPS - Microsoft's take on this subject. XPS is the fixed page subset of XAML. There's a few companies implementing XPS and selling the software to printer manufacturers. The manufacturer can either implement a printer driver that accepts XPS and translates it for their printer (not what you want) or do what MS wants and have the printer natively understand XPS. As far as a print language XPS is superior to Postscript, but then you'd expect that considering it's a lot newer. You can also generate it with code really easily without going completely bonkers. It also has a lot of good 'printer handling' facilities within it, that deals with all of the vagaries introduced by some many different makes, models and capabilities of printers.
I just love Koalas - they go great with Bacon.
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I fully agree but often you have to install the crapware just to get the driver out of the package. VMs have helped a lot here :-) I remember working as a tech supporting home workers with multi function printers and going spare that every time we had to buy a new printer HP would have changed the drivers for their machines and we'd have to tweak the images that we had for building new PCs yet again (not to mention the change in cartridge spec every time a new printer came out)
You have to go to HP's site to get the driver only version sometimes. Personally, I don't buy HP printers for that reason alone. Currently all my printers are Canon.
Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting. A man said to the universe: "Sir I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation." --Stephen Crane