How would I create my own XP printer driver which will do the following:
- print to file (probably XPS format)
- put this file into a password protected ZIP file
- email the zip file to a configured email address
views:
368answers:
3
+2
A:
While I can't offer any specific advice, if I wanted to do what you describe, the first thing I would do is read through the source for PDFCreator — it's a Windows print driver which can spit out PDFs.
David Wolever
2010-06-18 05:05:48
@David: the link for the source code on that site doesn't work.
Craig Johnston
2010-06-18 05:41:56
Oh, strange =\ Maybe here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator ?
David Wolever
2010-06-18 12:43:37
PDFCreator is internally using RedMon(http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/redmon/) to capture print data. Go for RedMon directly, it's also an opensource project works as a Port Monitor.
Jason
2010-06-23 17:42:31
@Jason: +1 - I specifically recommend redmon. In fact, you should submit that as an answer.
Stobor
2010-06-29 03:38:40
+4
A:
What you need is not a printer driver. One named it Print Monitor. It is a DLL, which will be loaded in Spooler.exe process. The DLL gives Spooler at the initialisation phase a logical names of ports like LPT1:, FILE:, SPSPort: etc. The optput prepared with a printer driver must be send in any way to a destination device. This work does print monitors like "Standard TCP/IP Port" or "Local Port".
To write printer monitor you need download and install Windows Driver Kit (WDK or some time ago DDK see http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/WDK/default.mspx). More information about writing printer monitor see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff563806(v=VS.85).aspx. Print Monitor is a DLL with some exported function (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff549405(v=VS.85).aspx). I recomment you to start with modifying of Local Monitor example LocalMon which full source sode you find after installing of WDK (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff556478(v=VS.85).aspx).
The most practical problem with writing of printer monitor is requirement of writing a real multithreaded DLL. You must be very carefull, understand and use EnterCriticalSection in all you functions. For debugging of printer monitor you should connect Visual Studio Debugger to the process Spooler. The rest is the same as writing of a standard windows Win32/Win64 DLL running.
UPDATED: One more small remark. If you don't want that the printer driver do anything with the data sent to the printer you can use generic printer driver. You will find it under "Generic" manufacture, printer with the name "Generic / Text Only". Examine some driver settings which you has (like CR LF settings)
Oleg
2010-06-23 17:37:47
This is the correct answer, I've done things like this. But you **don't** want to do any more than necessary inside the spooler process: after you grab the data, start a new process that does the zipping and emailing.
egrunin
2010-06-29 00:56:47
@egrunin: Good suggestion to make more complex work inside a separate processes! I wrote also many year ago a Print Monitor and I can say that the most complex problem is debugging in a multi-thread multiuser environment. Starting of the separate processes can make debugging easier.
Oleg
2010-06-29 08:14:25
+1
A:
Combine these programs, first cpri (for access through your code to a printer device)
It's in C language
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpri/
then you can use
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator
to get a virtual printer to generate the pdf, xps format output
Hernán Eche
2010-06-25 14:41:10