Editing Printer driver (section)

=== Amiga ===
The original AmigaOS up to 1.3 supported printers through a standard series of drivers stored at the required path "DEVS:Printers". All printer drivers were stored in that directory, and covered the standard printers in 1985-1989 circa, included [[Epson]] FX standard driver, [[Xerox]] 4020, HP, etcetera.

Any Amiga  printer driver had to communicate though the standard Amiga printer.device (the default standard hardware device of Amiga dealing with printers), and the standard parallel.device (which controlled parallel port) and the driver would then control the printer on its own.

Amiga printer drivers were an innovation for their time. They spared users from individually configuring each of their applications. They had the ability to print up to 4096 colors.

Through the use of the Printer Preferences program printers could be connected to the serial port as well.

Amiga also had support for a virtual device "PRT:" to refer to printer.device so, for example the command "COPY file TO PRT:" caused the file to be printed directly bypassing parallel.device and the default printer driver.  
Amiga used [[ANSI escape code]]s, not the special ones defined by the various printer manufacturers. This way every application on the Amiga could use the same standard set of control sequences and wouldn't need to know which printer is actually connected. The printer driver then translated these standard sequences into the special sequences a certain printer understands.

Amiga internal function "PWrite" of printer.device writes 'length' bytes directly to the printer. This function is generally called on by printer drivers to send their buffer(s) to the printer. Number of buffers are decided by the persons who created the driver. Amiga lacked a standard Printer Spooler.

Since AmigaOS 2.0 a standard printer.device was changed to control various printers at same time. The Printer preferences were divided in three main panels: ''Prefs:Printer'' which selects main printer and other basic elements such as "Print Spacing" and "Paper Size". ''PrinterGFX'' controlled features like Dithering and Scaling. ''PrinterPS'' controlled Postscript Printers. The printer drivers surprisingly remained almost same of Workbench 1.3, with 4096 limits.

This fact led Amiga users to prefer third party Printer Systems with their own drivers, like [[TurboPrint]] and [[PrintStudio]], which introduced not only recent drivers, but also featured a functioning Printer Spooler into Amiga, and featured 16 million colors printing. [[MorphOS]] uses a special version of TurboPrint to pilot recent printers.

Many Amiga programs like DTP programs as [[PageStream]] featured in the past its own printer drivers.

USB printers are automatically recognized by the [[Poseidon (USB stack)|Poseidon]] USB Stack. This stack is capable of detecting any USB device by its class, but printers still require a driver to be controlled.