4 ms·

Huh? How does a video card affect printing?

• jfoutz 3y ago
  A lot of rendering will go through the video card if available, like the jvm does this as an optimization.
  • toddmorey 3y ago
    Ah interesting. That makes sense. I had no idea.
• shever73 3y ago
  It often did, particularly on older versions of Windows. I helped uncover a bug in Epson printer drivers ~20 years ago that was caused by a specific graphics card.
  • shermantanktop 3y ago
    20+ years ago I was in tech support and had to help someone figure out an issue where her document wouldn't print on a Brother printer. Turns out a section divider line would block the entire doc from printing (by crashing the app) if the line's end-cap style was set to square rather than rounded.
• to11mtm 3y ago
  One of the ways to print things (especially on windows) is Via GDI. [0] Basically using the OS's rendering to make a raster that is then sent to the printer. The main thing the printer's driver does in this case is know how to take the bitmap and tell the printer to print the bitmap (i.e. chunking data and/or sliding the right commands into the bitmap stream) Contrast to, say, PostScript which allow for more compact and better scaling definition of what to print. This obviously works better for quality, however for a long time the issue was you then had to have sufficient processing power on the printer itself to handle it. [0] - Search for 'GDI Printer' for a little more info.
  • generationP 3y ago
    Interesting! So that's why I used to get crappily rasterized printouts of PDFs in Chrome a few years ago. I had thought printers could be trusted with their own rendering, but of course that is another can of worms...
  • userbinator 3y ago
    More relevant to the bug is the fact that GDI can do its own rendering, or send commands to a driver, usually for GPU hardware acceleration, but the same applies to printers.