Printing system

A printing system , English printing system , is software that receives a file to be printed as a print job, processes it and finally delivers it to a printer . On practically all modern computers , a user sends their print jobs to a printing system, never directly to a printer.

The tasks of a printing system are:

• queuing of jobs ( spooling ),
• the orderly processing of jobs in the queues,
• the completion and evaluation of information such as paper size or orientation,
• converting the file format into a format understood by the printer, for example PCL or PostScript ,
• the mapping of logical or virtual printers to physically available printers or printer groups,
• if necessary, the bookkeeping of the orders.

Common printing systems in the Linux / Unix world are:

• the System V -printing;
• the Berkeley Printing System ;
• Berkeley Printing, next generation, LPRng ;
• Xprint (from the X Window System );
• the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), which is the standard printing system of OS X and many Linux distributions.

A modern printing system is expected to be network-capable. In this case, the system is divided into any number of clients on the workstations and at least one server in the local network ( LAN ) that addresses the printer.