printing
fundamentals

print driver

Also known as: printer driver, print drivers, drivers

The software that translates an application's print output into the printer's native command language.

A print driver turns a generic print job from an application into the proprietary command stream a specific printer model understands. A wrong or stale driver prints garbled pages, missing fonts, or nothing at all. Driver chaos was one of the strongest arguments for an on-prem print server, then for Printix.

Printix maintains a global driver store and pushes the right Windows or macOS driver to a workstation when a queue is added. Where no model-specific driver exists, Printix can fall back to a vendor universal driver (HP, Canon, Konica Minolta, Kyocera, Lexmark, Ricoh, Toshiba, or Xerox).