Customizing Microsoft 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.
The designs of the Microsoft Universal Printer Driver (Unidrv) and the Microsoft PostScript Printer Driver (Pscript) are based on the NT-based operating system printer driver architecture. Therefore, each is composed of two components--a printer interface DLL and a printer graphics DLL. This section explains how to customize these components.
To customize the printer interface DLL provided for Unidrv or Pscript, you must provide one or more user interface plug-ins. You can use these plug-ins to modify the driver's user interface and to provide extra processing for certain printer events. If you are using Unidrv from Windows Vista, you can replace the user interface completely.
To customize the printer graphics DLL provided for Unidrv or Pscript, you must provide one or more rendering plug-ins. You can use these plug-ins to modify the data that is sent to the print spooler within a print job's data stream.
This section includes the following topics:
Implementing Printer Driver COM Interfaces
Installing Customized Driver Components
Common Property Sheet User Interface