Driverless Printing
By
Staten Island, NY Posted: 10/20/2015 1:00:00 AM
Every printer should be capable of printing without drivers.
In the early days of computing, you could plug any brand of printer into a computer and it would print. Drivers weren't needed. You just plugged it in and it simply worked... sort of.
As newer models came along with support for fonts, graphics and various paper sizes, each manufacturer created their own proprietary ways to support their specific features, which led to the creation of printer drivers. This made everything much more complicated. If you use the wrong driver, you can't print. What a pain in the neck.
To make matters worse, whenever a new operating system comes out, the old drivers are often incompatible, and the manufacturer may decide not to create an updated driver, forcing you to buy a new printer. At this point, your old printer is just a paperweight.
The easy solution is for every printer to have support for a common set of features. For example, every printer should be able to receive a PDF and print it.
Obviously without a printer driver, the printer will have limited access to advanced features, such as two-sided printing, multiple paper trays, etc., but there's no reason the printer can't print basic documents. By creating built-in support for a PDF document, any program or operating system should be able to easily print just about anything without a driver.
Drivers will still be needed for full device support, but at least it will continue to work whenever you can't find a driver or if the manufacturer doesn't create one for your operating system.
Joe Crescenzi, Founder
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