The following information is provided as is, and the authors take no responsibility for the correctness.

RPCS - Ricoh Refined Printing Command Stream

“RPCS” is the Unique Printer Language developed by Ricoh.

RPCS supports in both western languages such as English and complex asian languages such as Chinese in the Microsoft window environment only. There are currently no implementations of an RPCS printer driver for e.g. MacOS or Linux.

RPCS is a modern version of a GDI printer driver. The printer datastream is generated on the sending computer rather than the printer itself. It uses banding to generate portions of the printed page. This enables automatic tray changes between equal paper trays, but makes automatic page rotation quite impossible.

The RPCS command stream has been updated over the time, but is still generic enough to allow old printer drivers to print to modern devices. Since the RPCS printer driver is highly device-dependend it must communicate with the printer to match e.g. paper and color thus color-output might not be as expected if one uses the wrong printer driver for a device.

RPCS is not targeted to the enterprise environment, since it uses special local directories and needs write permission to the spool folder. But in small environments it proves quite superior to PCL or PS3 in speed an size.

RPCS printer drivers have been dropped by RICOH from their mainstream MFP/LP products in 2010 and the RIP will be replaced (with XPS) in 2012.

Reference

RICOH has not released any specifications of RPCS to the public so far. The commercial part of the RICOH Developer Program (see below) includes an SDK for the Windows printer driver, so the additional functions can be accessed from any application.

See the Ricoh Developer Program (RiDP) page:

The outer datastream can contain PJL as a job description language. To enter RPCS the statement @PJL ENTER LANGUAGE=RPCS is used. UEL will terminate the RPCS data stream as in PCL.