System Control

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.

System-controlled color management is the default color management type. It is also the recommended type for printers. If color management is enabled, GDI corrects the colors of all DIBs, pens, and brushes before sending them to the driver's printer graphics DLL, based on the input and output color spaces and installed ICC profiles.

No ICM-specific code needs to be added to a printer driver to support system-control color management, other than indicating support for CMYK color space (if appropriate), as described in Supporting CMYK Color Space.