Printer drivers were not such a well-defined thing as current CUPS drivers consisting of filters and PPD files or even Printer Applications are. They somehow turned a standard input format (usually PostScript or some bitmap format which Ghostscript was able to generate) into what the printer needs, but this was all what made a software be a printer driver. Drivers could be some output device compiled into Ghostscript, or some tiny, simple filter executable which turns Ghostscript's output into at least one of the input data formats of the printer, or one had Ghostscript Uniprint files to use the first data-driven Ghostscript driver, ... But anything machine-readable which tells how to use the driver and which user-settable options are there was usually not included. Here third-party projects like Magic Filters or apsfilter came into play ...
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