Glossary Of Printer Terms (Part 2 of 2):

This is Part 2 of the blog posting we began on Sunday, July 29^th, 2012.

Printing Media - What the printer prints on, i.e. paper, transparencies, film and CD/DVD surfaces. The media type that a printer can support differs by printer type and model.

MFC Printer - A MultiFunction (MFC)/All-In-One printer can perform a rich variety of task including printing, scanning, copying and even faxing. With an MFC/All-In-One printer, you do not need to invest in separate copiers, scanners or fax machines (unless you have special requirements). In general, an MFC/All-In-One printer makes installation easier and saves valuable office space.

Non-impact Printing  - Non-impact printing allows printing an image without striking the printing media. Both inkjet and laser printers are non-impact printers.

OCR – OCR stands for ”Optical Character Recognition” and is a computerized process that enables us to convert a paper document into a computer file that you can edit or manipulate using a program such as Microsoft Word or Word Perfect..OCR used to be an expensive technology, but today is found on many of the All in One/MCF printer/copiers…  All OCR systems work in conjunction with your printer/scanner so that when we put the document face down on the scanner glass, it takes a picture of the document, but stores the
picture” in the form of a bitmap file/also known as an image file – and the OCR software then examines the patterns of dots in the image file and create a file that contains text that is represented as fonts and ASCII codes (once this is done most OCR system discard/delete the image/bitmap file)

PPM - Pages per minute, used to measure printing speed. A printer’s printing speed varies depending on print quality settings, print media, and page size.

SPOOL/SPOOLING: Basically, spooling is the process of placing data in a temporary working area for another program to process. Today, most of us here this term in reference to document s sent from our computer to our printer – known as print spooling.  This means that documents formatted for printing are stored usually in an area on a disk on our printers and retrieved and printed at the rate determined by that printer..  Printers typically can print only a single document at a time and require seconds or minutes to do so. With spooling, multiple processes can write documents to a print queue without waiting. As soon as a process has written its document to the spool device, the process can perform other tasks, while a separate printing process operates the printer

On a stand-alone computer, spooling is handled by the operating system. On a network computer, documents are sent to a print server, where they are spooled before being sent to the designated printer

(We will address how to clear you printer spooling if it freezes or gets jammed in next weeks blog on August 10th)

Two Sided Printing - A technology allowing printing on both sides of the paper (sometimes referred to as duplex printing).

USB - The USB (Universal Serial Bus) port is a popular I/O interface used for connecting computers and peripherals or other devices – USB connections are the most popular interface today for all printers and most other peripheral devices.