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  1. #1
    Join Date
    May 2002
    Location
    Germany
    Posts
    451

    Printer driver... or what? :)

    My boss asked me to write a program for Windows what is used for customizing printing. It should be listed as a printer in the Print screen/General tab. Is it really a driver what I need to do that?
    After print is clicked, it should allow the user to select one of the pre-set profiles (preferences, advanced) and send data in a custom format to the print server (not directly to a printer, but rather to a server application what will handle it).

    So, that is the question: how to get it started, and is it a printer driver or something else? Any link or example is appreciated, as well as some explanation.

    Thank you

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Apr 2000
    Location
    Belgium (Europe)
    Posts
    4,626

    Re: Printer driver... or what? :)

    Quote Originally Posted by luftwaffe View Post
    My boss asked me to write a program for Windows what is used for customizing printing. It should be listed as a printer in the Print screen/General tab. Is it really a driver what I need to do that?
    After print is clicked, it should allow the user to select one of the pre-set profiles (preferences, advanced) and send data in a custom format to the print server (not directly to a printer, but rather to a server application what will handle it).

    So, that is the question: how to get it started, and is it a printer driver or something else? Any link or example is appreciated, as well as some explanation.

    Thank you
    If you want it to be listed as a printer and be usable from any windows program, then yes, you'll need to write a printer driver or rather, most of the time it suffices to just develop a printer driver plugin. Whether you'll need a full driver or a plugin depends if you need additional settings to do your printing than the current model provides.
    Currently windows provides for 3 printer driver models (Postscript, Unidrv and XPSDrv (XP and up only))

    You will need to obtain a copy of the WDK. There are samples in there. Note that the drivers come with their own compiler, you can't compile a driver with VC++.

    you'll probably need to support both a 64 and a 32Bit version of your driver. and you may have to write it for multiple platforms depending on what versions of windows you need to support.

    Writing drivers is NOT something I'd recommend unless you have a few years of windows development under your belt.


    if you only need things to work from inside apps of your own, then a save-as or export option will save you A LOT of development time.

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