About Printing

One of the chief features of Windows printing functions is their support of device independence; instead of issuing device-specific commands to draw output on a particular printer or plotter, an application calls high-level functions from graphics device interface (GDI). For example, to print a bitmapped image, an application can call the BitBlt function, supplying the coordinates for the bitmap as well as handles identifying the source and destination device contexts (DCs). The call to BitBlt is then converted to raw device commands by a printer device driver. A device driver is a Windows dynamic-link library (DLL) that supports the Windows device driver interface (DDI). A device driver generates raw device commands when it processes calls to DDI functions made by the graphics engine. The commands are processed by the printer when it prints the image. The syntax, number, and type of these commands vary from device to device.