Improved Support for Printers and Other Imaging Devices

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A major printing innovation in Windows 2000 is support for the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP). With IPP, you can print to offsite printers via IP addresses. In addition to letting you take advantage of special service-bureau printing features that you might occasionally need, Internet printing provides a great alternative to fax and e-mail. Internet printing is discussed in Chapter 12, "Printing."

Windows 2000 also introduces support for the Imaging Color Management 2 (ICM) standard. ICM provides a communications link between the hardware devices and software programs that reproduce color. It maps colors between devices, ensuring that the original image colors are accurately interpreted by an input device (such as a scanner or digital camera), displayed on a monitor, and printed on paper or saved in electronic format. ICM is described in Chapter 6, "Making Other Customizations."

Additionally, Windows 2000 incorporates a scalable font technology called OpenType. OpenType, a superset of the TrueType technology included with Windows NT 4, handles both TrueType and Type 1 fonts (fonts designed for use with PostScript output devices) from a unified registry, allowing you to install a set of Type 1 fonts in Windows 2000 and then manage and use those Type 1 fonts the same way you manage and use the rest of your font library. Font support is described in Chapter 13, "Installing and Using Fonts."