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documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.

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Printer-driver initialization occurs whenever Windows or a Windows
application loads the printer driver using the LoadLibrary function
(KERNEL.95). Windows loads a printer driver whenever an application uses the
CreateDC function (GDI.53) to create a device context for the printer.
Windows applications load the driver to prepare for subsequent calls to the
printer driver's DeviceMode, ExtDeviceMode, or DeviceCapabilities function.
 
As with other dynamic-link libraries, Windows calls the printer driver's
initialization routine (if any) when it loads the driver. The routines of
most drivers do little more than initialize the heap and load resources,
such as the name of the driver's Help file. Although a driver may require
additional initialization, it typically waits until GDI provides the
additional information needed for this initialization when it calls the
driver's Enable function.
 
If a printer driver allocates global resources or alters the state of the
system, the driver is responsible for freeing these resources and restoring
the previous state before the driver terminates. Because every driver
includes a WEP function that Windows calls as the driver is quitting, the
printer driver can use this function to free resources and restore the
system.
 
 
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