QualityLogic Challenges Direct-To-PDF Printers

In a recent blog post, QualityLogic asked printer/MFP manufacturers, “Is Your Printer PDF Battle Ready?” and offered a quick test to find out.

PDF is the most popular document format for document exchange. PDF generation, editing and printing capabilities are now bundled and supported widely by PCs, phones, tablets and the like. This rise in the use of PDF has driven the need for native PDF printing support down into even the home/small office class of printers. For a printer that can handle PDF documents directly, the user simply opens the Windows print-spool-window and pulls a pdf-file into it. The file gets printed properly with no driver dialog window or additional tools involved.

Adobe Acrobat has been the premier PDF file generator for years but now most office document editors, such as MS Word or Open Office offer the option to save the current document to a PDF file. The free to download Adobe Reader means that anyone can open and read a PDF file and this, as much as the format’s utility, has caused the PDF document to become a data transfer standard.

Windows 10 finally came up with a print to PDF feature to create .pdf files from any application. If you’re using Windows Vista, 7, or 8, you can print to the Microsoft XPS Document Writer printer which will create an XPS file. You’ll then have the document as an XPS file that you can convert to a PDF file later. Any new printer or MFP that supports direct PDF file printing needs to be tested against the output from this native driver.

QualityLogic offers a PDF Application Test Suite (ATS) and PDF Functional Test Suite (FTS) that can be used to ensure PDF-direct printers produce the expected output, and now we’re offering a free sample FTS file so you can do a quick check of your own devices. The QualityLogic PDF FTS and ATS test files cover basic PDF operators, such as use of dashed patterns, fonts, and others. You may find the results very surprising!

Is your PDF implementation battle ready?