Graphics Device Interface
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Graphics Device Interface (GDI, sometimes called Graphical Device Interface) is one of the three core components or "subsystems", together with the kernel and the user (window manager), of Microsoft Windows.
GDI is a Microsoft Windows standard for representing graphical objects and transmitting them to output devices such as monitors and printers.
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[edit] GDI
GDI is responsible for tasks such as drawing lines and curves, rendering fonts and handling palettes. It is not directly responsible for drawing windows, menus, etc.: that task is reserved for the user subsystem, which resides in user32.dll and is built atop GDI. GDI is similar to Apple's classic QuickDraw.
Perhaps the most significant capability of GDI over more direct methods of accessing the hardware is its scaling capabilities, and abstraction of target devices. Using GDI, it is very easy to draw on multiple devices, such as a screen and a printer, and expect proper reproduction in each case. This capability is at the centre of all WYSIWYG applications for Microsoft Windows.
Simple games which do not require fast graphics rendering, such as Freecell or Minesweeper, use GDI. However, GDI cannot animate properly (no notion of synchronizing with the framebuffer) and lacks rasterization for 3D. Modern games use DirectX or OpenGL, which give programmers access to more hardware capabilities.
In Windows Vista, GDI applications running in the new compositing engine, Desktop Window Manager, will no longer be hardware-accelerated.
[edit] GDI printers
GDI printers (also known as Winprinters akin to Winmodems), in particular GDI laser printers, replace the traditional processing power of the printer itself with capabilities "borrowed" from the host computer. They work by rendering an image to a bitmap on the host computer and then sending the bitmap to the printer.
In general, the cheapest current-model laser printers are GDI devices. Most manufacturers also produce more flexible models that add PCL compatibility, or PostScript, or both. In most cases it is only the very cheapest models in any given manufacturer's range that are GDI-only!
[edit] Technical details
A Device Context (DC) is used to define the attributes of text and images that are output to the screen or printer. The actual context is maintained by GDI. A DC, which is a handle to the structure, is obtained before output is written and released after the elements have been written.
A DC, like most GDI objects, is opaque, meaning that you can't access its data directly, but you can pass it to various GDI functions that will operate on it, either to draw something, to get information about it, or to change the object in some way!!!
[edit] GDI+
With the introduction of Windows XP, GDI was deprecated in favor of its successor, the C++ based GDI+ subsystem. GDI+ is a "next generation" 2D graphics environment, adding advanced features such as alpha blending, gradient shading, more complex path management, intrinsic support for modern graphics-file formats like JPEG and PNG (which were conspicuously absent in GDI), and general support for composition of affine transformations in the 2D view pipeline. Use of these features is apparent in Windows XP's user interface, and their presence in the basic graphics layer greatly simplifies implementations of vector-graphics systems such as Flash or SVG. The GDI+ dynamic library can be shipped with an application and used under older versions of Windows.
The Microsoft .NET class library provides a managed interface for GDI+ via the System.Drawing namespace.
GDI+ is similar (in purpose and structure) to Apple's Quartz 2D subsystem, and the open-source libart and Cairo libraries.
[edit] GDI+ vulnerability
- In September 2004 it was found that GDI+ and other graphics APIs were vulnerable to an exploit related to a defect in the standard JPEG library. The vulnerability allowed someone to cause code execution on any system that displayed their jpeg with a tool that used the decoder in GDI+. - *Microsoft Security Bulletin MS04-028 - *F-Secure: Critical vulnerability in MS Windows may escalate the virus threat
