Opinions about univesal printer driver

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

[Ilja Kamps]

On Mon, Sep 02, 2002 at 02:17:41AM +0200, [e-mail] wrote:
> 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?

Well, Wine once supported Windows printer drivers, (I belive the support got 
broken in early 2001), but based on that you should be able to resurrect support 
without too much trouble.

[Huw D M Davies]

On Mon, Sep 02, 2002 at 02:31:38AM +0200, Ilja Kamps wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 02, 2002 at 02:17:41AM +0200, [e-mail] wrote:
> > 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?
>
> Well, Wine once supported Windows printer drivers, (I belive the support got 
> broken in early 2001), but based on that you should be able to resurrect support 
> without too much trouble.

There's some support for 16 bit printer drivers (note the drivers for
win9x are 16 bit).  The code is in dlls/gdi/win16drv/ but as you say
this may well be broken at the moment.

Huw.