Spoofing Windows Printer Driver

[John Court]

Hi,

I'm using windows 98 and software called Sage to print onto all sorts of
different stationery, but this is inefficient. I would like to capture the
data sent from the application to the printer and process it with some
custom-written software. This will allow me to do away with all the
different types of stationery. I imagine it is fairly straightforward to
create a "dummy" or "spoof" printer that windows will happily send the data
to, but unfortunately I have little experience in windows programming. Any
ideas?

John.

 

[jbuch]

Hi,

I'm using windows 98 and software called Sage to print onto all sorts of
different stationery, but this is inefficient. I would like to capture the
data sent from the application to the printer and process it with some
custom-written software. This will allow me to do away with all the
different types of stationery. I imagine it is fairly straightforward to
create a "dummy" or "spoof" printer that windows will happily send the data
to, but unfortunately I have little experience in windows programming. Any
ideas?

John.

Get ready to spend some fairly good money, just in case the triviality
of your estimate of the problem is a drastic underestimate.

"Sage " is often known as financial and checkprinting software, isn't it?

Jim Buch

Jim Buch

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[John Court]

Get ready to spend some fairly good money, just in case the triviality
of your estimate of the problem is a drastic underestimate.

"Sage " is often known as financial and checkprinting software, isn't it?

Jim Buch

Sage is basically accounting software, yes. The conventional way of getting
printed output is to use special stationery. I can hack a solution by
reading the "spool" files and parsing the content, but this is not
particularly neat.

 

[Marek Williams]

I'm using windows 98 and software called Sage to print onto all sorts of
different stationery, but this is inefficient. I would like to capture the
data sent from the application to the printer and process it with some
custom-written software. This will allow me to do away with all the
different types of stationery. I imagine it is fairly straightforward to
create a "dummy" or "spoof" printer that windows will happily send the data
to, but unfortunately I have little experience in windows programming. Any
ideas?

Do you mean you want to capture exactly what the application is
sending to the printer? Then just create a printer and set the port to
FILE instead of the default LPT1.

 

[ed]

What model printer are you using? Is this commercial or personal?

Ed

 

[John Court]

What model printer are you using? Is this commercial or personal?

It doesn't make any difference to the problem, but probably a laser of some
description. Commercial.

Ed

At the moment I have got to the stage of using a generic printer driver and
saving the output to file. This is fine, but a filename has to be entered
for each print job, which is a bit of a hassle. I think I need to get inside
tty.drv in order to improve the situation, but I'm not sure. Still, I got
the source code off Microsoft, so I'll have a look!