The Design And Implementation Of Driver And Controller Of Wide Format Printer

Wide format printer with the printing width 24 to 44 inches is often used to print design drawings and blueprint. In general, the characteristics of these graphs are wider, longer, mainly made up of lines, and the media is always light blue with dirty resistant. With the development of large scale industrial and mining establishments, designing institutes and building industries, the traditional blueprinting with low productivity and the bad influence of ammonia will be replaced by the wide format printer which is famous for high speed and high resolution and environment friendly.In tradition, the wide format printer is accompanied with single RIP application and simple controller. The operator should first open the RIP app and convert the document to print job files, and then open the controller to perform managing and printing job. Limit in supporting formats and verbose in operation make it hard for operators. In this paper, the driver and print server solution which supports all kinds of applications and can carry out remote automatic printing with the print server enabling the auto-printing function is proposed for the sack of generality and usability.The driver customized in this paper is based on the universal printer driver framework of Windows OS: customize OEM options in the UI module through modifying GPD file; customize the format converting in the render module by offering a render plug-in. The print server discussed in this paper is based on a wide format print engine framework from an American Company which consists of four modules: job adding module can receive job data from driver, scan hot folder or be manually operated by the user; printing module is responsible for previewing jobs, setting paper margins, dither matrix and so on, managing and controlling the printing, error handling; print engine status monitoring module provides the real time status of the PE; media feeder managing module can change the settings of the feeder and display the status of it.The driver and print server can perfectly meet the demand of the wide format print market by testing such as the most document editor driver supporting, regular printing managing, remote automatic printing providing, robust check, timely state diagram and so on. By contrast with traditional software scheme, what we designed has morecolorful functions and better usability.