Hi.

 

How printers prints documents? For example: The Microsoft Word sends a document for the printer and the printer prints it. I'd like to know how the printer knows how print (About the formatting for example, how color to print).

Read about PostScript and PCL.

 

Basically, they are industry standards used by most commercial printers for specifying printed page layouts.

Fascinating subjects, too. PostScript is actually a Turing-complete programming language, and it addressed a really interesting computer engineering problem back in the day.

for Color printing such as a picture, it`s important to know a little bit of the fundamentals of printer and computer architecture.

essentially if you can imagine a sheet of graph paper, each square on that paper has a known location an Address, and inside each square we can put in information Data.

that Data (in an 8 bit system) can hold any number between 0 and 255, this can be used to represent a specific color or shade.

on a Monitor it`s called a Pixel.

so now you have your picture made up of a grid of different colors (a bit like the little dots seen in Newsprint).

of course this is done on a Very tiny scale 100`s of dots (addresses with data in) per inch, that make up a picture