Generating printer drivers

A printer driver is implemented by the following files:

• a .pdr file containing the printer specification data

• a .pdl file that implements the abstract printer driver interface

• a localisable printer name resource file.

A .pdr file is a stream store, and is generated by running the pdrtran tool over a text file containing printer specification data. The source text file has the extension .pd. It contains:

• the name and UID of the associated .pdl file and a list of the printer models supported by the driver. This is contained inside the Printer driver file definition statement.

• lists of the attributes of each supported printer model, such as minimum margin widths and the typefaces supported. These are contained in one or more Printer model statements.

• definitions of each typeface, including the font heights supported, and whether or not it is proportional and/or serif. These are contained in one or more Typeface statements.

• information about each font, including the maximum character width, character ascent and the width of each character in the font. This is contained in one or more Font information statements.

• lists of translations for unsupported characters, in Translates statements.

• lists of command strings that the printer uses to perform operations such as turning bold on and forcing a new page, in a Resources statement.

A .pdr can contain more than one model because different models are often based on different combinations of the same typefaces. This allows character width tables (which make up the bulk of the data stored) to be shared.

Different .pdr files can reference the same .pdl.

.pdr files are located in \resource\printers\.

A .pdl file is a plugin DLL for a printer driver. It must implement the abstract printer driver interface defined by CPdrDevice and CPdrControl. The derived classes CFbsDrvDevice and CFbsDrvControl provide support for bitmap-based printing, and are usually derived from.

The ordinal 1 function exported from the DLL creates and returns a pointer to an instance of the derived printer device class.

The mmp file for the DLL needs to specify PDL as the targettype, and 0x10003B1C as its second UID. The third UID is the PDLUid value specified in the Printer driver file definition statement.

.pdl files are located in the standard loction for DLLs (under \sys\bin\).

This is an optional, localisable resource file, (with a .rNN extension, where NN is a language code), that maps the UIDs of all the printer models supported by the driver (as specified in the Printer model statements) to their names, potentially in different languages, for display in the UI. It is located in \resource\printers\.