Print ticket and print capabilities provider interface implemented by Unidrv/Pscript5 plug-ins

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.

The Microsoft Universal Printer Driver (Unidrv) and Microsoft PostScript Printer Driver (Pscript5) core printer drivers on Windows Vista provide the means for plug-ins to implement print ticket support. Because Unidrv and Pscript5 both support loading multiple plug-ins for a single driver, each plug-in is able to provide its own provider implementation. The driver vendor is responsible for ensuring that each of the OEM plug-in provider implementations works correctly with the others. Not all of the plug-ins in a printer driver need to support the provider interface. However, the versions of the print ticket schema that are supported by the core driver are a subset of the versions that are supported by the core driver and all of the available plug-in providers. Because calls into the plug-in provider are driven by the application, the plug-in provider must be implemented in a thread-safe manner.