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OT: Printer interface

Does anyone know or know where to find a specification of the Windows printer driver interface? I am in particular wanting to determine whether the interface accepts a plain ASCII character stream or if the stream is being converted to something such as Postscript before being sent to the driver.

Alternatively, does anyone know how to capture the raw data being sent to the printer interface before the driver munges it?

Windows printer application -> generic --X--> driver -> printer printing operations

"X" marks the point at which I'd like to know what's being transferred to the driver.

A related question would be whether the character stream is munged before it gets to Windows if the application is a DOS escapee and is outputting to PRT:.

Reply to
Everett M. Greene
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Neither, really. Windows printing works through the GDI layer. You draw text into a device context using GDI calls. The driver does see ASCII (or Unicode, maybe) at the TextOut() level - but if the application rasterizes internally (e.g. software Postscript engine txlating PostScript for output on a non-PS-capable device), the driver won't see this.

This is a different kettle of fish. A DOS program dumps raw data into the spooler. There's some magic in there related to timeouts, determining when the DOS application has finished printing, and so on (some of this is handled by emulating BIOS calls in the VMM), but it definitely does NOT traverse the same code path as printing from a Windows app.

Reply to
larwe

I don't think so. I know it doesn't automagically output a formfeed at the end of a DOS print job.

Reply to
Jim Stewart

Dear Mr. Greene,

you may want to have a look at Printfil to send text files or DOS LPTx jobs to a compatible Windows printer in RAW mode (without going through the printer driver), or automatically converted in GDI jobs for a generic Windows printer (including escape sequences recognition/conversion)

Yuu can find more info and a free trial version to download at

formatting link

Kind regards, Davide Guolo aSwIt s.r.l.

-------------------------------------------------------------- Printfil - Windows Printing System for Applications

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@Kill - Batch Close Windows Applications - Freeware
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Reply to
Davide Guolo

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