Plotter Driver Capabilities

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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.

The Microsoft Plotter Driver (MSPlot) provides the following capabilities:

  • Support for all plotters that use the HPGL/2 version of the Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language, by means of plotter model-specific plotter driver minidrivers.

  • A plotter driver user interface, based on the TreeView control and property sheets, that is consistent for all plotters.

  • A plotter driver renderer that, along with the GDI graphics engine, converts Win32 GDI calls from applications into printer commands that can be sent to the print spooler.

To provide support for a new HPGL/2-compliant device type, all you need to do is provide a minidriver that describes the device.