A printer is a peripheral machine that prints documents, usually text and sometimes graphics. They can be used to produce hard copies of the files produced by a computer, and they can be attached directly to that device or connected over a network. They can vary in size, sophistication and cost.
Modern printers can handle a wide range of formats, including raster and vector images. They can also produce different print resolutions, allowing them to create high-resolution photographic prints or to render very accurate drawings. They can also produce multiple colors. Inkjet printers are most common, and they can vary in their maximum resolution, speed and color depth capabilities. Laser printers, on the other hand, offer higher-resolution output for both text and images, while supporting a wide range of image formats.
Early printers worked something like an automatic typewriter, striking a pin on the ribbon to make an impression on paper for each character. Later models used a chain or train of character slugs traveling horizontally across the print head to form characters, such as those found on the IBM 1403 chain printer. They can be considered either impact or non-impact printers, the latter being a class that includes dot matrix and line printers.
Modern printers typically use a page description language to describe the format of each document they print. They may support various manufacturer-specific PDLs or the open standard PostScript. The PDLs can vary in complexity, and some can only process text data while others, such as Hewlett-Packard’s Printer Command Language (PCL), can handle both text and raster graphics.
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