Why should I choose either PCL or PS when both are supported

Question

Obviously the answer depends to some degree on the various versions supported, but in general terms - is there any reason I should pick one over the other? PCL for art and PS for text? Does one typically require less RAM on the printer? Speed differences? For home use it doesn't matter and only professional print people will notice and care?

Wikipedia References:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_Command_Language
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript

Update: No specific programming is involved, or any specific programs. Just simply put - if a given printer supports both PCL and PS, is there an advantage to picking one over the other? Is there a pros/cons list somewhere?

Answer 1

Post script is great if you are using your printer to produce a draft of some “art work” that will then be printed on a hi-end printer by a print shop. This is because you will get about the same output on all postscript printers as they can use the same typefaces etc. (Postscript was designed to drive hi-end typesetters that cost well over $10,000)

PCL was design by HP for printing office type documents to their basic laser printers. At the time PCL come out (late 1980s), most printers did not have a powerful enough CPU to process Postscript at a reasonable speed. PCL does text and simple graphics well, it will also cope with photos.

A few highend graphics/design software packages will send Postscript directly to a printer (bypassing any printer driver), if you are using such a package you will know and will not be asking this question.

For the rest of us, the printer drivers in the OS hides most of the differences between Postscript and PCL from the application, so you will see little difference in normal day-to-day usage.

I would tend to say.

• PCL for office type documents like letters
• Consider Postscript if you are doing hi-end design, or going to send the document to a “print shop” for final printing.

Answer 2

Post script is more common, at least more people use it for printing.

Answer 3

PostScript is a programming language. PCL is strictly a page description language. Using PostScript allows for fancy effects to be done when printing (such as having a font's shape change each time a character is output in order to emulate worn-down movable type), but most people will never need its advanced capabilities.

Answer 4

What printer do you have? Is PCL and PS actually supported? Some printers offer one but emulation of the other (ie they will render the PS document on the machine and send it as PCL to the printer).

If they both are actually supported, I would use PCL as a matter of personal preference.

Answer 5

For home use, you probably won't notice much difference. If you have an HP printer, you'll likely get better results using the PCL driver, since PCL was developed by HP. For other printers, look through the specs and see if you can find out which language the printer uses internally -- that will usually give you the best results, since there won't be any translation involved.

For commercial printers, Postscript is the language of choice in most cases (specialty printers like envelope printers are exceptions). It has more flexibility than PCL, and since it was developed by Adobe, it's likely to have fewer issues with the PDF standard (also developed by Adobe, and related to Postscript) and Adobe Creative Suite files.

It won't hurt to install both drivers and compare. I do a lot of printing, and have worked around a number of printing glitches simply by switching to a different driver.

Most of the time, though, you won't see any substantial difference between the two.

Answer 6

In practical terms you're unlikely to see much difference in general use (with one exception, below). Programming the two is quite different, but even there it's very rare to be doing raw coding in either these days - most people write programs to deal with GDI, etc. and let the drivers figure out what's actually being generated.

The main area where you may see significant differences is if you're printing a high volume of PDF files, or are printing complex PDFs. For those you may see significantly better performance by using PostScript, because PDF is PostScript with a few tweaks. Many (most?) modern PS printers can actually accept PDF files as well, and in the past Acrobat at the least has been able to spool PDFs to PostScript printers much faster than it can print them using the actual GDI calls. I'm not sure whether any of the non-Adobe PDF viewers have that little tweak.

PostScript may also be a little more widespread if you're doing things like connecting to remote systems and printing things back through a connection to a local printer, just because the driver is pretty much the same - you mostly just need a small PPD (Postscript Printer Description) file that defines the options that your particular printer has. This can mean that Postscript printer driver downloads end up being much smaller than PCL or other page definition language drivers.

Answer 7

If you are printing PDF files, use a PostScript driver. For everything else, use PCL because it's faster for non Postscript files and in many cases enables more printer features, like duplexing.

Answer 8

The comment that PostScript is for expensive printers is not correct. Many low cost printers today support PostScript. You probably won't see it on very cheap inkjets sold for consumer use.

But... IF you try to print a large PDF via PCL to a printer you will notice it takes much longer to print than if you use a PostScript driver.

Most (Almost ALL) copiers that are placed in office environments support PostScript. There are no PCL drivers for Macintosh computers so they must print to the device via PostScript. All but the absolute cheapest laser printers support PostScript or some emulation of it.

IF you notice that printing large PDFs takes a long time consider having a PostScript driver installed and printing via PostScript instead.

Answer 9

PCL is faster, PS more precise.^[1]