Last modified:	Thursday, Mar 8, 2007	Article ID:	570
Related products:	Firmware v6.5.x (CE 4.2)

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Objectives

Network Printing enables users in locations geographically separate from each other and from their print devices to produce documents for themselves and others. Print servers enable multiple clients to share one or more print devices. By using the Active Directory directory service in the Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 operating systems, users can locate printers in a target location that supports the features necessary to produce their documents.

Terms and Definitions

The following three terms are data types associated with Network Printing.

RAW

Data type used in a page description language that is ready to be sent to a print device; for example, PCL or PostScript. This is the default data type for print jobs on computers that are not running Windows XP Professional or Windows 2000. These RAW files are device-dependent; that is, the spooled data is destined and formatted for a particular device.

EMF

Data type used between print clients running Windows XP Professional and print servers running Windows Server 2003. With an enhanced metafile (EMF), the Graphics Device Interface (GDI) releases console control after generating the EMF. The EMF data is then interpreted in the background on a spooler thread and sent to the printer driver. Splitting the rendering of a print job in this way is especially useful for very large documents because the application is not tied up for the entire rendering time.

EMF spool files are encoded to provide greater printer independence. For example, a graphic measuring 2 inches by 4 inches on a video graphics adapter (VGA) display and stored in an EMF maintains those dimensions whether it is printed on a 300-dpi laser printer or a 75-dpi dot-matrix printer. The EMF data type also ensures that the print server uses the fonts you specified.

TEXT

Data type used to send a simple-text print job to a printer (such as a PostScript device) that cannot interpret simple text. The spooler creates a new print job, embedding the text in print instructions that are derived from the printer?€™s defaults for font, form, and orientation. Several character sets are in common use, and text files do not indicate which one to use. The TEXT data type uses the ANSI character set, so it might print some characters incorrectly if the application uses a different set.