1.1. „Virtual Printer
Driver“– What does it actually mean?
To some extent, a driver represents an extension of the operating
system (OS) for a certain device (e.g. a printer or a computer screen), in other
words, a software which adjusts the OS data for the hardware device.
(You may
ask yourself, if it would be easier to embed the drivers into the OS, instead
of having to add dozens of drivers to the system later on. However, these extensions
are necessary because at the time,
when the OS was created and programmed, no one could have possibly foreseen
which devices each single computer equipped with this operating system would
have to work with. For the reason alone, that most of the devices have been
developed and brought on the market only after the operating system has been
finalized – for example, Windows 2000 could not possibly predict the requirements
of a printer brought on the market in 2004).
A
Virtual Printer Driver – literally, should
be called a “driver for a virtual printing device”- differs from usual printer
drivers by the fact that it does not pass the graphical data of a document supposed
to be printed, but saves the data as image file to hard disk. So when printing
in MS Word document (*.doc) or a
PowerPoint presentation (*.ppt), the image will
not be sent to the printer, but saved on the hard disk.
In this manner you will obtain exposure-ready image data from all the PC programs /applications, as EXTIF
pro is, a driver i.e. an extension of the operating system, and not a PC application / program.