Network printing is one of the most complicated and error-prone day-to-day tasks any user or administrator may encounter. This is true for all OS platforms, and there are reasons it is so.

You can't expect to throw just any file format at a printer and have it get printed. A file format conversion must take place. The problem is that there is no common standard for print file formats across all manufacturers and printer types. While PostScript (trademark held by Adobe) and, to an extent, PCL (trademark held by Hewlett-Packard) have developed into semi-official “standards” by being the most widely used page description languages (PDLs), there are still many manufacturers who “roll their own” (their reasons may be unacceptable license fees for using printer-embedded PostScript interpreters, and so on).