Building a custom Virtual Printer Driver

Question

My objective is to develop a custom printer driver. The functionality of the driver will be to convert the document into PDF and upload it into a database. I have my Visual Studio 2017 and WDK10 installed. How should I proceed further?

Answer 1

Consider the LEADTOOLS Virtual Printer SDK (https://www.leadtools.com/sdk/print/virtual-printer) which you can use to create a virtual printer that captures the EMF file from printing from any valid Windows application. You can then use this EMF output to generate your desired PDF output.

(Disclaimer: I am an employee of this toolkit’s vendor)

The code for handling the captured EMF and saving it as PDF would look like this:

// Write the EMF as file to disk as PDF.
static void VirtualPrinter_EmfEvent( object sender, EmfEventArgs e )
{
   string pdfPath = "Output.pdf";

   // Create an instance of the LEADTOOLS DocumentWriter
   DocumentWriter docWriter = new DocumentWriter();
   docWriter.BeginDocument( pdfPath, DocumentFormat.Pdf );

   DocumentEmfPage page = new DocumentEmfPage() 
   {
      EmfHandle = new Metafile( e.Stream ) )
         .GetHenhmetafile()
   };
   docWriter.AddPage( page );
   docWriter.EndDocument();
}