Capturing RAW print data from a third party app

[Mateus]

Hi all,

As I'm a newbie I'd better briefly introduce myself - I'm a VB hobbyist but, although I work within the IT industry, I haven't done much serious programming for about 4 years. I'm now returning to programming and currently working in VB.net 2008.

The project I'm currently working on needs a module that will capture RAW print data from a third-party application and save it to a shared network directory. I was going to use the open source print driver 'Image Printer' as this has a 'Raw data only' option which can save to network drives.

The only problem with Image Printer is that it will overwrite the RAW file if that file name already exists (e.g. user A prints image46.raw but this is overwritten if user B also happens to print image46.raw). This is a problem because multiple users (approx 20) will be printing to the same directory.

Therefore I need to write a basic printer driver (or port driver?) that will capture the RAW data and save it in a format such as 'UsernameDateTime.raw'.

Having done a bit of research, there seems to be an overwhelming amount of technical info and I'm not such where to start. Any advice or web links would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,
M.

 

[Hack]

Do the vendors of the third party application have anything like an SDK that you could use?

 

[Mateus]

Hi Hack, thanks for the quick reply!

Unfortunately the third party app has no SDK & they're support team is not very helpful either.

The third party program (a healthcare package) prints in just plain text. The program I'm writing needs to process this data once a day, reformat it and then print to a local printer. I plan to get the third party app to print to a secure shared folder as RAW and then my VB.net app could process the RAW files when required. Image Printer was perfect until I realised it was over writing files.

M.

 

[Mateus]

I've discovered there's a bug in ImagePrinter 2.0.1 that's causing the raw image name to save incorrectly. v2.0.0 doesn't have this problem and I can therefore set each user up to create a unique raw image file name and thus over coming the problem of overwriting files created by other users.