Improvements in XPSDrv
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 article provides information about updates that have been made to the XPSDrv rendering architecture.
XPS format
The XPS Print API and/or the print filter pipeline will convert seamlessly between Microsoft XML Paper Specification 1.0 (MS XPS), and OpenXPS (ECMA-388). Unless otherwise specified, v4 print drivers default to consuming MS XPS. Using the manifest directive XpsFormat, drivers may choose to support one or both of the available XPS formats. For more information about OpenXPS support, see OpenXPS Support in Windows.
XPS Rasterization Service improvements
The XPS Rasterization Service has been improved in Windows 8 to make use of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to provide faster XPS rasterization. These performance improvements are available on Windows 8 systems with GPUs that use the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) 1.2. XPS rendering filters don't require any modification to take advantage of this improvement, and it will be available for both v3 and v4 print drivers.
The XPS Rasterization Service can also provide rasterization in several pixel formats, including the following new, high precision formats. As a result, print drivers that use the XPS Rasterization Service can now target color precision at 8 bits, 16 bits and 32 bits per channel. For more information on pixel formats, see Native Pixel Formats Overview. These new pixel formats are supported by the XPSRaterizationFactory1::CreateRasterizer1 method. The following table shows the XPS Rasterization Service Pixel Formats.
| Value | Channel Count | Bits per channel | Bits per pixel | Storage type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GUID_WICPixelFormat32bppPBGRA | 4 | 8 | 32 | UINT |
| GUID_WICPixelFormat64bppPRGBAHalf | 4 | 16 | 64 | Float |
| GUID_WICPixelFormat128bppPRGBAFloat | 4 | 32 | 128 | Float |
IPrintCoreHelperUni2
The IPrintCoreHelperUni2 interface was introduced in Windows 8 to support the retrieval of command strings from GPD files. The interface is identical to IPrintCoreHelperUni, except for the additional GetNamedCommand method.
Related articles
Microsoft XML Paper Specification 1.0