Printers are probably the biggest source of problems for most IT Admins.  Paper jams, low ink, leaky toner and streeky printing are just some of the joys you will often face.  Another common issue is slow or incomplete printing, what’s the answer to this equally common user woe?

Well your in luck because this is one thing you may be able to ensure is not an ongoing issue for your users.  Most printer manufacturers (i.e. Xerox, Canon and HP) offer Universal Print Drivers (UPDs) to tackle these very issues.

As a rule of thumb PostScript Drivers are best for printing from Adobe applications such as Acrobat (PDF) and/or other complex documents.  PCL Drivers are usually best for priting basic documents, Microsoft Word Documents (doc, docx) and Excel Spreadsheets (xls) to name a few.

You may find it best to install and share your network printer twice, one instance using the PCL Driver and the other using a Postscript (PS) driver.  You then just need to educate your users which printer instance to select from the printer list according to the document type they are dealing with.

Please feel free to comment on your own experiences