Printing

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Printing enhancements are made possible in large part by the Universal driver and the PostScript driver.

Universal Driver

The Universal driver has been optimized to provide higher quality and performance printing. Color printing using ICM 2.0 ensures that color images are accurately maintained. The Generic Print Description (GPD) supports minidrivers, abstracting the details of each printers communications, thereby allowing unsupported printers to work with Windows 2000.

The Universal driver enhances font performance and capabilities. Printer font substitution results in better output, and 2-byte fonts are supported, enabling printing of extended character sets. The set of extended character fonts supported includes Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Indic, Thai, Kana, and Hangul characters, punctuation marks, and ideographs.

The Universal driver is designed to support customization, allowing greater flexibility in the sorts of print devices that can be used with Windows 2000.

PostScript 5.0 Driver

The PostScript driver provides better performance through enhanced virtual memory management. Color printing with the PostScript driver uses ICM 2.0 ensuring that color images are faithfully maintained.

Microsoft has extended the PostScript driver to support more font formats and provide the structure for future customization.

PostScript continues to support the following:

  • Support for PostScript levels 1, 2, and 3.

  • ICM 2.0.

  • Control over output data format, allowing for CTRL+D handling, Binary Communications Protocol (BCP), Tagged Binary Communications Protocol (TBCP), and pure binary (8-bit) channels (AppleTalk, for example).

  • PPD version 4.2 and .wpd files.

  • Simplified Printer Description (.spd) files.

  • Tracking of virtual memory available to the printer.