Legacy v3 and v4 third-party printer drivers

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.

This section provides information on designing, testing, and debugging legacy v3 and v4 third-party printer drivers.

In this section

V4 printer drivers

Microsoft printer drivers

Printer driver overview

Microsoft Universal printer driver

Microsoft PostScript printer driver

Microsoft plotter driver

GDI printer drivers

Print ticket and print capabilities technologies

Writing 64-bit printer drivers

Installing and configuring printer drivers

Printer configuration

Generic Description Language (GDL)

GDL reference

GDL examples

Printer autoconfiguration

Autoconfiguration details

Autoconfiguration implementation options

Bidirectional communication

Bidirectional communication schema reference

Bidi interfaces and enumerations

Asynchronous user notification schema

Web services for devices print service schema

Printer driver isolation

Customizing Microsoft printer drivers

COM Interfaces for printer web pages

Print pipeline property bag

Additional printer articles

Print spooler components

Printer driver testing and debugging

Print DDI reference