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Print Ticket Compatibility with Win 32 Applications

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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.

When you use Print Tickets in Microsoft Win32-based applications and GDI-based print drivers, you must consider the following compatibility scenarios:

Win32-based applications that are printing to XPSDrv print drivers
When a Win32-based application that is not aware of Print Ticket documents prints to an XPSDrv print driver, the GDI-to-XPS conversion module creates an XPS spool file from the DDI calls that the Win32-based application makes. The Windows Vista print support also creates Print Tickets that are based on the DEVMODE structures that the Win32-based application uses and inserts them into the XPS spool file that is created for the document. The GDI-to-XPS conversion can convert only the public portion of the DEVMODE structure. The conversion embeds the private DEVMODE into the print ticket as a binary large object (BLOB), using appropriate XML binary encoding. You can restore the binary BLOB to the private part of the DEVMODEW structure from the print ticket in the DEVMODEW-to-Print Ticket conversion.

To the XPSDrv print driver, a document that is sent from a Win32-based application is not different than a document that is sent from a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application because both documents are spooled in the XPS spool file format.

WPF applications that are printing to GDI-based print drivers
When a WPF application prints a document that contains Print Tickets to a GDI-based print driver that does not support Print Tickets, the Windows Vista print support converts the XPS Document that the WPF application passes to an EMF file and converts each Print Ticket to a DEVMODE structure.

To the GDI print driver, the print job from a WPF application is not different than a print job that a Win32 application sends.