When one refers to a universal printer driver it does not mean all of them are actually universal like all the drivers are using exactly the same techniques when it comes to communicating with a printing device and executing a job. The word 'universal' really means that the driver can virtually drive any printing device on any operating system. When making a comparison of these drivers, three different drivers can be identified.
Universal Printer Driver Based On a Standard Printer Driver
A universal printer driver made and designed using a standard driver was the very first kind of its own to be ever used. In this method a normal standard printer driver was modified to work as a universal driver. More often than not the drivers used were the HP drivers that included the HP LaserJet 4/5 used when monochrome printing was required and the HP LaserJet 4500 when color printing was the need of the hour. These two drivers could handle print jobs sent from computers to many HP printing machine
Now this technique was not a universal printer driver exactly but it was a good replacement and a good example of a universal print driver as it was not made for the specific HP printing device but worked well none the less. Though this was the very first instance of a universal print driver it is now reaching the end of its existence.
A similar type of universal driver for printing was used by Citrix for their mainframe or presentation server right until their version four. However, a few SBC products are still successfully using this kind of driver. Another universal driver is the MS Fallback driver for printing widely in use today.
The MS Fallback universal driver is usually preinstalled in the software package you have purchased and so there is no need to buy additional software, besides this is easy to maintain and troubleshoot. However, one drawback with this driver is that it does not support some printing devices and has a lot of limitations with duplex sessions and tray support.
Universal Printer Driver Based On the EMF Format
EMF is the format Windows uses to render a print command. A specified driver creates an EMF file and sends it to the Windows spooler. The print job is transferred via the EMF driver to the windows client printer product. The product client for printing receives the print EMF file and sends it on to the client print spooler.
The drawback here is that EMF is only used on Windows platforms and so this kind of driver can only be used on Windows operating system. These EMF files are also larger than the PDF based files.
EMF files are sent to the printing machine on the client this way the server does not have to do so much work. When using an EMF based Universal driver the original quality of the job is unaltered.
Universal Printer Driver based On the PDF Format
This is the least common kind of universal driver used for printing. Here the EMF file is created using the client's spooler in a PDF format and sometimes a PCL file is created. This is sent to the client where it is rendered into the EMF format and the print job is sent to the printing machine.