Spoofing Windows Printer Driver

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.

John Court wrote:
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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"jbuch" wrote in message
...
John Court wrote:
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

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.

On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 14:29:41 +0100, "John Court" dijo:

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.

--
Bogus e-mail address, but I read this newsgroup regularly, so reply here.

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

Ed

On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 14:29:41 +0100, "John Court" wrote:

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.

"ed" wrote in message
...
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!