Editing Printer (computing) (section)

=== Printer control languages ===
Most printers other than line printers accept [[control character]]s or unique character sequences to control various printer functions.  These may range from shifting from lower to upper case or from black to red ribbon on typewriter printers to switching fonts and changing character sizes and colors on raster printers. Early printer controls were not standardized, with each manufacturer's equipment having its own set.  The IBM [[Personal Printer Data Stream]] (PPDS) became a commonly used command set for dot-matrix printers.

Today, most printers accept one or more [[page description language]]s (PDLs). Laser printers with greater processing power frequently offer support for variants of Hewlett-Packard's [[Printer Command Language]] (PCL), [[PostScript]] or [[XML Paper Specification]]. Most inkjet devices support manufacturer proprietary PDLs such as [[ESC/P]]. The diversity in mobile platforms have led to various standardization efforts around device PDLs such as the [[Printer Working Group]] (PWG's) [[PWG Raster]].