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Printer drivers and print options
Printer drivers and print options
This section describes the role of the printer driver and explains how to use Windows
and Mac OS PostScript printer drivers for Fiery 3850C printing. PCL printer drivers
are also available, but they support only a few of the color features described in this
manual. To take full advantage of the color management features, use the PostScript
printer drivers.
N
OTE
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The term “PostScript” by itself is used to refer to Adobe PostScript Level 2
or later.
What a printer driver does
To take full advantage of the features of the Fiery 3850C, your print jobs must be sent
as PostScript data. Since most applications cannot generate PostScript data directly, it
is the function of a printer driver to interpret instructions from the application and
convert them to PostScript data.
A PostScript printer driver also allows you to select print options specific to your
printer. To do this, the printer driver must be matched with a PostScript printer
description file PPD for your Fiery 3850C. The PPD contains information about the
particular features supported by the Fiery 3850C and the printer. You can think of the
PPD as the lines of PostScript code in the file that are device-specific. When you print
a job, the printer driver lets you choose among features by displaying print options.
A few PostScript applications can send PostScript data directly to the printer and
present print options within the application interface. Even these applications,
however, require that you use a PostScript printer driver. See Getting Started for
information on installing printer drivers.
We recommend you set the print options initially in Fiery 3850C Setup (see the
Configuration Guide). This provides you with a default configuration that is
appropriate for most Fiery 3850C print jobs.
