UNIX System Administration Handbook, Third Edition

23.1 MINI-GLOSSARY OF PRINTING TERMS

Although an overview of current printing technology is beyond the scope of this book, we will try to give you enough information to respond when someone begins haranguing you in printer jargon.

spooler	A spooler is a piece of software that receives print jobs, stores them, prioritizes them, and sends them out sequentially to a printer. A user-level command submits jobs to the spooler for printing. A spooler is often called a print server. Some printers have their own internal spoolers.
dpi	Many modern printers are bitmap devices, meaning that the actual output is composed of rows of tiny dots. A printer’s dpi is the number of dots per inch that it can print. Generally speaking, the higher the ...