faLLeN

Hey everybody.

Just discovered this site and thought it would be a good place to ask this question.

The end result I am looking for is to be able to capture (in plain ASCII text, no images) the print job contents of any application that is print enabled.

The best way I can think of is to have some kind of customised print driver that I can install in Windows so that any print enabled application could print to this special driver, and the driver would then pass the contents of the print job to a VB 6 program for processing.

Flow:

Any print enabled application -> Custom print driver -> VB6 application

The target systems are Windows 98/XP/2000/NT and the output from the driver to VB6 must be in plain text, so it would be just like reading a normal ASCII text file for example.

Thanks,
Matthew Hall
inDarkness.co.uk

jorgen_i

Try looking for routines at:
www.sysinternals.com (free drivers and source)
www.codeproject.com (everything...system utils, etc.)

sysinternals has a lot of monitoring utils, tcp, port, I/O.

The thing about Win platforms is that they actually write to a temp file before they print, regardless of the 'port' or USB buss they eventually send to.

Check out both the system and print stuff over at codeproject, don't lock it down to language-specific or you might miss out.

VB is cool, but it doesn't let you get low-level enough to do the kind of thing you have in mind, you might be able to write a DLL in C that will be callable in VB if you do it right (codeproject has those too).

Anyway, good luck, hope you find what you need.