Important Notice

The pages on this site contain documentation for very old MS-DOS software, purely for historical purposes. If you're looking for up-to-date documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.

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A printer driver is a dynamic-link library (DLL) that consists of a set of
graphics functions for a particular printer device. These graphics functions
translate device-independent graphics commands into a stream of
device-dependent commands and data. A printer driver receives the graphics
commands from the graphics-device interface (GDI) portion of Windows and
sends device commands either directly or indirectly to the printer.
 
Each printer driver supports a specific printer technology. Printer
technologies include raster devices (for example, dot-matrix printers) and
vector devices (for example, plotters), and devices with higher-level
languages, such as PostScript page-description language (PDL). However, a
printer driver can support any number of models and manufacturers as long as
the printers share the same basic technology.
 
Unlike most Windows device drivers, a printer driver is generally not
responsible for hardware communication with the printer. Instead, the driver
uses existing Windows functions to open and write to a printing queue, to a
file on disk, or directly to the printer through a communications port.
 
 
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