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Plotter Driver Minidrivers

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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.

Model-specific minidrivers for the Microsoft Plotter Driver are vendor-supplied binary .pcd files created from text files that describe a device's characteristics.

PCD Files

To generate a .pcd file, you must first create a text file using the PCD source file format. You must then run plotgpc.exe, which is included with the Windows Driver Kit (WDK). This program will convert a text file into a binary .pcd file. Use the following command syntax:

plotgpcsource-file-path .txt target-file-path .pcd

For both the source and destination files, you must explicitly specify file name extensions; defaults aren't supported.

A sample text file that can be used as input to plotgpc.exe is included in the sample plotter driver files.