Plotter Driver Components
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.
MSPlot components consist of DLLs and binary data files, as illustrated in the following diagram.
Components in the diagram include:
Application
A user application that provides users with printing capabilities.
gdi32.dll
User-mode DLL that exports Win32 GDI functions.
Kernel-Mode Graphics Engine
NT-based operating system executive code that implements GDI functionality.
Minidrivers
MSPlot minidrivers (.pcd files).
Cached .pcd file data
Minidriver data read from .pcd files.
plotui.dll
Plotter driver user interface DLL, providing common UI code for all MSPlot-supported printers.
compstui.dll
CPSUI user interface for printers.
plotter.dll
Plotter driver renderer, which renders images and sends the image data stream to the spooler.