How to create a virtual printer in Windows?

Question

I want to create a virtual printer driver for Windows. How and where can I start properly? The WDK has some printing drivers examples that do not seems a good introductory. MSDN also doesn't seems to be very helpful for a novice.

There are a lot of virtual printers for Windows out there (mostly they generate PDFs), I wonder if someone could tell my how can I do the same?

Any links to the elaborating documentations are appreciated in advance.

Thanks.

Answer 1

When I did it (which about 12 years ago) I started with the postscript driver sample, replaced all the postscript-specific stuff (in my case, to write to a bitmap instead of generating postscript commands).

I also wrote a custom print monitor (the driver writes to the spooler, which write to a monitor): my monitor wrote to a file instead of e.g. to the parallel port.

However, printer driver architecture and/or the set of sample drivers may have changed since then.

Answer 2

You can look to the 'minidriver' development in the from Microsoft (Microsoft MDT), that might help depending on your exact needs. If the port you need to deal with (ie: you are going to take the data from an existing printer driver and want to process) you could look to the source code for RedMon. It doesn't support Vista/Win7 but might point you in the right direction.