Listen on printer cable for print and save to image file?

I assume I would need a special centronics cable to do this, but is it possible to get the print d开发者_运维百科ata from the remote device and convert it to a image file in .Net?

thanks,

Jason

This has not much to do with .NET. First you need to have some "receiver" hardware and driver, then you need to know the protocol used (PCL, PostScript, or something completely different or proprietary), and only then you can start thinking about the platform where you process the data.

That said, it may be easier to capture the data directly on the remote device.

Doing a remote capture of an LPT connection would be rather difficult. Converting the print data into an image would probably be even more difficult. (PCL, Postscript, or one of many other formats.)

If you just need the ability to print to an image why not check out something like PDFCreator. I have used it on several occasions and it works great. You can even share the virtual printer out as a network share or LPR queue for remote printing. You can configure it to print to a standard share on a network. And later you could write a service that could move the images to FTP or send them over email. (Much less pain then trying to sniff LPT.)

More...

It may be possible to use something like a parallel LapLink cable between the computer that is currently attached to the printer and another computer. Using a setup like that you could try to sniff the data connection. The problem is some of the functions for printing will not work with a bi-directional data cable so it it possible you would have one heck of a trying to protocol sniff the printer data.

• Parallel Port (PC)
• LapLink Cable
• Printer Cable
• IEEE 1284-B
• IEEE 1284-C
• Centronics (36 pin)

If it's possible to get the device you want to capture from to print to a serial port it will be vastly easier to get the data stream into the PC. I've listed a couple of commercial solutions below and they all convert to serial to go to the PC. To get the data from the parallel port you've got to handle the hardware interface See LPTCAP, then you've got to read from the parallel port. See Parallel Port Central, look for the Programming heading about half way down.

Some commercial solutions are PrintCapture and Photologic.