## Printer Device Driver

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### 32-Bit Plotter Presentation Driver

The Plotter Presentation Driver is a 32-bit vector graphics driver. Vector graphics drivers use drawing primitives, such as lines, arcs, boxes, circles, and area fills, to draw complex graphics images. The Plotter Presentation Driver relies on the graphics language capabilities of the printer or plotter to do the actual drawing.

For example, to draw a circle, the plotter driver sends the circle command with radius information to the printer. The printer has the responsibility of drawing the circle on the device.

The vector graphics languages that this driver supports are Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language (HP-GL and HP-GL/2) and IBM Graphics Language (IBM-GL). If the device or graphics language does not support the OS/2 drawing function, the driver will either call back to the graphics engine for simulation or convert the drawing function to a supported primitive. For example, an OS/2 FillPath call might be converted to a HP-GL/2 FillPolygon.

The Plotter Presentation Driver can also support devices that can mix HP-GL /2 and raster data such as laser printers or raster plotters. In the DEBUG version of the driver, a sample PCL laser printer is supported. The RETAIL and DEBUG versions of the driver support raster plotters using the HP-RTL language.

The files that comprise the Plotter Presentation Driver are PLOTTERS.DRV and PLOTTERS.HLP. PLOTTERS.DRV is the executable code and data of the driver. The PLOTTERS.DRV file exports OS2_PM_DRV_ENABLE, OS2_PM_DRV_DEVMODE , and OS2_PM_DRV_DEVICENAMES entry points. PLOTTERS.DRV has an extended attribute (EA) that must be present for the driver to be installed correctly. The PLOTTERS.HLP file contains the help panels for the Job Properties and Printer Properties dialog boxes of the driver.