Virtual Printer Driver for Windows

Question

Hello, can you please help me with the following questions...

• If I need a virtual printer that will convert a PostScript stream to a different format, do I have to implement a virtual printer from scratch or implement a rendering plug-in?
• The rendering plug-in seems to support only certain customizations. Also the data invariably goes to the spooler which is not needed in this case.
• If I implement a virtual printer driver does it completely replace the Microsoft PostScript Driver or the Microsoft Universal Driver?
• Since my driver is virtual, does it matter if I write a PostScript compliant or a Universal Driver compliant one?
• Any other method to convert a printed document to a custom document format apart from implementing a virtual printer driver? Can I hook on as a port monitor or something? From what I could understand I guess not.

Answer 1

Not sure I fully understand. You have an app that produces Postscript and you want to convert that to something else? If the application outputs the 'print ready' data then a new printer driver isn't going to help as the 'queue/driver' is just a way to get the data to the printer and not something that is creating the output file.

You might be best to look at something like: Redmon

This can take the output and spawn an new process. The idea would be that you have it output the Postscript to a file and then you launch some console .exe that you create against it.

Just a thought.

Answer 2

Again not sure which way round you are doing this, but ghostscript is the simplest way to convert a PS output into any other format. It's also pretty easy to write your own output format for ghostscript.

This all happens at the app level - no need to write a driver.