Microsoft simplifies the task of building a printer driver by providing, in the Windows® 95 DDK, a Universal Printer Driver (Unidriver). The Unidriver is capable of carrying out request (such as printing text, rendering bitmaps, or advancing a page) on most types of printers. This saves a printer driver developer from writing the code to carry out these requests. (This minidriver/Unidriver model is not new to Windows 95; it was also used in Windows 3.x.)
To build a driver for a particular printer, a developer builds a minidriver, which accepts requests from GDI and then, in most cases, passes the request to the Unidriver along with information that describes the capabilities, commands, and resident fonts of the particular printer. By building a minidriver that sends requests to the Unidriver, a driver developer who understands the hardware and command set for a printer can develop a driver with comparatively little effort.
To simplify the task of building a minidriver, a tool called Unitool is included in the Windows 95 DDK. You can develop a minidriver for your printer by running Unitool and responding to the user interface. For information about installing and running Unitool, see Installing the UniTool Application.
This section