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GDI Printer Drivers

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Important

The modern print platform is Windows' preferred means of communicating with printers. We recommend that you use Microsoft's IPP inbox class driver, along with Print Support Apps (PSA), to customize the print experience in Windows 10 and 11 for printer device development.

For more information, see Modern print platform and the Print support app design guide.

All Windows 2000 and later printer drivers consist of the following components:

  • A printer graphics DLL that assists GDI in rendering a print job, and sends the rendered data stream to the print spooler.

  • A printer interface DLL that provides both a user interface to the driver's configuration parameters, and an interface the spooler can call to notify the driver of print-related system events.

In addition, Microsoft-supplied printer drivers make use of printer data files.