Software Imaging :: Software 2000 Announces Advanced PCL XL Printer Drivers For Windows 3.x/95 and Windows NT

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Software 2000 Announces Advanced PCL XL Printer Drivers For Windows 3.x/95 and Windows NT

OXFORD — March 19, 1998 — Software 2000 today announced the availability of a family of fully featured PCL XL driver products for Windows 3.x, Windows 95, 98 and Windows NT 4. Based on Software 2000's Component Driver Architecture (CDA) these drivers and development kits are immediately available for licensing by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs).

The PCL XL drivers are vector in nature, include rich vector (TrueType outline) and raster font support and exhibit a common feature set cross-platform. Drivers created using the SW2000 XL CDA Developer Kit are "World Ready" and support Pan European, Far Eastern, Middle Eastern, USA and other variants of Windows 3.x/95 and Windows NT 4.

These PCL XL drivers are designed to be Windows 98 and Windows NT 5 ready and are fully customizable by OEMs using CDA Device companion PCL XL Driver Kits (DDKs) (also available now). Using the core feature set provided by these PCL XL drivers, OEM customizations will meet or exceed the XL driver specification(s) set by Hewlett Packard's custom PCL XL drivers as seen on the HP 4000 and HP 5000 printers.

In addition to fully supporting features exhibited by HP's PCL XL drivers, Software 2000's PCL XL drivers include a high-speed host raster mode and incorporate printer job finishing (including but not limited to n-up & scale to page). Existing CDA add-in's which include Watermarks, Printer Overlays and TrueType Font Installers are immediately available to all printer drivers based on CDA technology and this includes the new PCL XL driver products.

Tony Harris, Technical Director of Software 2000 commented, "We anticipated that HP would probably extend the XL specification to be more color aware in the future. We also expected that some OEMs would create color laser printers based on the initial PCL XL specification. To allow for these situations we developed our PCL XL drivers to be fully color aware immediately and they can support up to 24 bit per pixel color out of the box.", he said.

Commenting on the host raster mode inherent in the PCL XL driver cores he said, "In our early tests HP's drivers printed some images more slowly using XL vector mode than with their PCL5e legacy drivers. This is because PCL XL drivers must transmit raster data at 8 bits per pixel when in native XL mode whereas most PCL5e drivers transmit raster data at 1 bit per pixel. To deal with this discrepancy we incorporated an optional host raster mode into our driver cores that supports error diffusion or regular screening and then transmits the print data at 1 bit per pixel. The amount of data is therefore reduced dramatically and print performance has been increased with some images by anything up to two-thirds".

CDA is a modular driver development technology which significantly accelerates the development of printer drivers and de-skills the work involved. A CDA driver is developed using a scripting or description language. The same CDA driver descriptions created on one operating system platform may also be used to create a driver for the other. CDA driver cores exist for color raster, PCL5e, PCL5c, PostScript Level 2 and PostScript 3 on Windows 3.x/95 and Windows NT 4.

Since its launch in 1996, numerous major printer OEMs have leveraged CDA driver technologies. Manufacturers including Canon, OCE, Hewlett-Packard, Ricoh, Samsung, Xerox have chosen CDA to satisfy some or all of their driver needs.

About Software 2000

Software 2000 specializes in the development of driver technology for Windows 3.x, Windows 95, Windows NT and supplies to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) throughout the world.

In just eight years, Software 2000 has grown into a multi-million dollar company with offices in Monterey, California and Oxford, England. The company is recognized as the largest third party developer of printer drivers in the world.

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