Q: We need to develop is a virtual PDF printer driver with some
special abilities; one of them being that it doesn’t actually produce
any printed output – only a PDF document. This printer driver must be
able to:
- Work as a network printer.
- Produce PDF/A 1A compliant PDF documents.
- Apply a background image to some or all pages, e.g. by
selecting a paper tray.
- Read configuration and default settings from a file at
runtime.
- Not show any form of dialog to the user – the printer driver
will be installed on a server and runtime changes to print settings
must be controlled from script in the printing application.
- Be programmatically flexible i.e. allow us to add code at
certain points in the print flow e.g.:
o Expose something to the application that is printing (Before
actual printing)
o Send the ‘printed’ document to a web service (After
printing)
We have found the two following products:
- PDFNet ((http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet) and
- PDFTron Virtual Driver SDK
We have, with the aid of an evaluation copy of PDFNet, been able to
fulfill a number of the above requirements; we’re able to apply/stamp
background images, convert the PDF document to PDF/A 1A and send it.
What we would like now is to package this functionality into a printer
driver so any printing application would be able to use it.
Can the above products technically support what we would like to do?
Do you have some more technical information on the PDFTron Virtual
Driver SDK? Is it C# and .Net?
In what price range is the PDFTron Virtual Driver SDK?
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A: Based on your requirements, it seems that PDFNet itself would be
ideally suited for your solution. PDFTron 'Virtual Driver SDK' extends
PDFNet SDK with source code for a complete virtual printer driver
(including GUI, installer, etc). The source code for Virtual Driver
SDK is written in C++. Since your solutions don't require any GUI
elements, it seems that you can achieve all the required functions
using only PDFNet (and you can use any supported language: C#, vb,
Java, C++, etc.). The licensing for PDFTron Virtual Driver SDK is
based on OEM/Redistributable model (http://www.pdftron.com/store/
licensing.html).