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When printing in Windows, the printer is controlled by Windows and print jobs are held in a print queue before being sent to the printer.
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Character/line printers can start printing as soon as they receive the start of the document.
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Page printers must receive the entire page (including fonts and graphics) before they can start printing.
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TrueType is a popular scalable font technology; Windows has native support for TrueType since version 3.1.
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HP LaserJet printers use PCL (Printer Control Language) as their native language; it is widely emulated by other brands.
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Adobe PostScript has more powerful graphics features, but requires PostScript language commands be sent to activate printing.
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Dot-matrix printers usually have 9-pin or 24-pin printheads. They are best suited for multipart forms.
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Inkjet printers typically support CMYK printing with two or more ink tanks (black/all colors or one for each color ).
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Laser and LED printers both use the EP process to print, but LED printers use an LED array to write data to the imaging cartridge instead of a laser.
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The EP (electrophotographic) process has six steps: cleaning, conditioning, writing, developing, transferring, and fusing.
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Replacing the toner cartridge solves many problems with most laser printers because most of the imaging process happens inside the toner cartridge.
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Direct thermal printing uses heat-sensitive paper, whereas thermal transfer printing uses ribbons and can support multicolor printing.
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Dye-sublimation printers use a thermal process that turns dyes into gas to print continuous-tone photographs.
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Solid-ink printers are page printers that use separate CMYK ink blocks to print the page.
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Printer drivers control printers under Windows.