Opinions about univesal printer driver

m.kostrzewa at pentacomp.com.pl m.kostrzewa at pentacomp.com.pl
Sun Sep 1 19:17:41 CDT 2002


Greetings to all Wine community! 

I've been wondering if this is the right place to post it, I belive yes, 
please forgive me if not :) 

I'm trying to imagine a method for using windows printer drivers under 
linux. As far as I know, from gdi's point of view it works like:
LoadLibrary(driver) (drv appears to be a dll),
some of 24 DDI functions which every printer driver should contain, 
Initialization = Enable, Control, next goes drawing functions like Output, 
Pixel. It doesn't have to access paralell ports - it can write to file (when 
printing under Windows you have this little checkbox, and gdi initializes 
driver telling this filename I think). Content of this file can be directly 
sent to port in Linux's way. I know that's not that simple, but I'm very 
interested in your opinions: what do you think about it having experience in 
dlling under linux :-) ? I know that wine doesn't run drivers, but it can 
run win dlls. Is it possible at all? Or this is just a 
linux-supports-every-printer dream? Perhaps someone tried this already? 

best regards,
Michal Kostrzewa 




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