If you have already gone through our previous article dedicated to virtual printers, we recommend you to learn more about the formats used by printers. You might find this information useful for both work and your personal printer usage.
Print to PDF
PDF is one of the most widely used formats in the business. But this is not only used in business as well as used in Universities, Medical, Law, and in a wide sector. Printing out PDF is one of the most widely used printing formats and regular tasks for virtual printers. This is one of the features that every operating system has and supports right out-of-the-box these days.
A major operating system like Windows started supporting virtual printers in the later version of Windows. So in case, anyone of you needs to use virtual printers in an older version of the Windows you need to manually install the virtual printers. You can easily set it up by going through the official Adobe software. But it is not confined to the Adobe, you can find a bunch of third-party options out there as well.
Print to XPS
XPS is a kind of format/ file extension that contains a fixed page layout with necessary information laid out with XPS page language. This document typically contains the page layout, printing information, and appearance. XPS file format is closely similar to a PDF format but it is saved in Microsoft’s own XPS format to draw the line.
Windows versions like Vista started supporting and including Microsoft XPS document writer as their printer configuration. This can be used to create a .XPS file extension that we just talked about that can be opened by the included XPS viewer program. Support for the XPS files typically varies from system to system, but most of them have third-party or proprietary software available out there to work with the XPS file.
Print to image
Printing to an image with a virtual printer is quite different. You will still have this option. It lets you save a regular image file such as a BMP, PNG, JPG, TIFF, and other image formats, Have some sort of problems when used for documents. These problems typically occur as the text won’t scale and can not easily be searched or you cannot select or copy, but they are extremely portable and can often be opened with software included in any operating system on many of the devices.
In case you do not have such software included where you can open this kind of format, you need to go and look up a third party that can open this kind of format. You can find a bunch of. Third-party software is out there on the web.