Unidrv
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Unidrv (Universal printer driver / Unidriver) is the Microsoft Windows universal printer device driver. It is used to simplify driver development for printer manufacturers. Unidrv allows the creation of a printer-specific minidriver in the form of a GPD file, which is much simpler than the standard kernel mode driver development scheme.
The Unidriver is implemented as a set of DLL and GPD files along with other printer-specific supportfiles:
- UNIDRV.DLL is the printer graphics driver file for printer languages based on raster images, including most inkjet and dot-matrix printer languages.
- UNIDRVUI.DLL is the configuration file. It displays the user interface for UNIDRV.DLL.
- UNIRES.DLL, STDNAMES.GPD, TTFSUB.GPD and some other support files.
- Raster minidriver, which has the file name extension .GPD, is the data file, and is also called the characterization file. The file name depends on the printer or printer family.
Newer Unidrv-based printerdrivers from some printer vendors, e.g. Hewlett Packard, may contain many other supportfiles (fx EXE, DLL, INI, CFG, CAB, XML etc.) to allow support for more printerspecific options - this may result in Unidrv-based printerdrivers of considerable size and file-count.
The Unidriver is also called the raster driver because it supports raster (bitmap) graphics printing and is compatible with many printers. This driver supports the following features:
- Color printing at various depths, such as 4 bits per pixel (bpp), 8 bpp, and 24 bpp.
- Scalable TrueType and OpenType fonts, device fonts (including double-byte), grayscale printing, font substitution, run length encoding (RLE), Tag Image File Format (TIFF) version 4.0, and Delta Row Compression (DRC).
- An extension interface that allows printer manufacturers to customize the driver for specific models.
- Vector graphics languages HP-GL/2 and PCL-XL, monochrome, and color. This is a change from the version of Unidriver that shipped with Windows 2000. (The added HP-GL/2 support, which is used with normal PCL5e printers, is different from the HP-GL/2 for plotters, which is used only for plotters.)
To determine whether a driver you have installed is Unidrv-based, do the following:
- Click Start, and then choose Printers Folder.
- Click File, and then click Server Properties.
- Click the Drivers tab.
- Select a driver, and then click Properties.
- Look at the Driver File list box of in the Driver Properties dialog box. If UNIDRV.DLL appears on the list of files, the driver is Unidrv-based.
