The following information is provided as is, and the authors take no responsibility for the correctness.
Table of Contents
Windows Printing
The Microsoft Windows® 95 and later printing architecture consists of a print spooler and a set of printer drivers. By calling device-independent Win32 printing and GDI functions, applications can create print jobs and send them to any of a variety of devices, including laser printers, vector plotters, raster printers, and fax machines. Printer drivers include a user interface component that allows users to control a printer's selectable options.
An application's calls to Win32 GDI functions are passed to the GDI graphics engine, which either spools the drawing instructions as an EMF file or, in conjunction with a printer driver, renders a printable image that can be sent to the spooler. Spooler components interpret EMF files, and they can insert page layout information and job control instructions into the data stream. The spooler then sends the data stream to the serial, parallel, or network port driver associated with the target printer's I/O port.
Mailing List
- WinPrnDev - Windows Printer Driver Development
This list is dedicated to the development of printer drivers and spooler components for the Windows family of operating systems. Looking for Win32 or user-mode peer support? Not here.
But if you've got a design, implementation or support issue with a Windows printer driver, this is the place to be - Take the opportunity to learn from your peers to get over that particular development hump.
Links
You can find links to other websites and information about Windows printing, on the links page.
Articles
- Windows Separator Pages (by Joachim E. Deußen)
http://www.cyrtech.de/tscorner/Windows%20Separator%20Pages.pdf - Printing Architecture (by B Venkat)
This article explains about the components of printing architecture.
http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/wpa.asp - Converting Win32 Kernel-mode Print Drivers to User Mode (by Steve Friedl)
http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/win32-pdriver-ktou.html
Additional Information
Books
 | Windows Graphics Programming: Win32 GDI and DirectDraw, by Feng Yuan. The world's most complete guide to Windows graphics programming! -Win32 GDI and DirectDraw: Accurate, under the hood, and in depth -Beyond the API: Internals, restrictions, performance, and real-life problems -Complete: Pixel, lines, curves, filled area, bitmap, image processing, fonts, text, metafile, printing -And more ISBN 0130869856 |
