Disclosed is a method and apparatus for driving a printer driver based on a determined type of application, and driving one of an extensible markup language (XML) paper specification (XPS) driver and a legacy driver in accordance with the determined type of application. The most appropriate printer driver may be automatically selected in accordance with the determined type of application. Thus, a user does not have to inconveniently select a printer driver whenever the user prints data and the data may be printed using the most appropriate printer driver. Furthermore, an optimized printing operation may be performed even when a user does not check whether an application to be used is a particular type of application, or whether a printer driver corresponding to the application is an XPS driver or a legacy driver.