Need Help in Building Printer Driver

I need some help in building printer driver. The printer connects to system via serial port. I just need to grab the data that application sends to the printer, compress it (its a custom routine) and send it to printer.

I do not have any experience in developing drivers. I have all the tools, SDK, DDK. If someone could point out some link to a sample driver (that could just write to flat file instead of sending to printer) that would be great.

The driver has to run on windows NT.

So basically i am looking for some sample printer driver, the DDK (with the name of winprint) has one but when i compile and link it, it generates dll file instead o开发者_如何学JAVAf sys.

Please not once again that the WDK wont work as this driver would be running on NT.

You should use the Win NT DDK. It would have sample files. Also in Windows NT, the printer driver files are actually .dll files and not .sys files. Printer drivers are a different category of drivers in Win NT and need to be installed using the Add Printer Wizard and in a package form with an INF file.

If you already have the Win NT DDK, you could use the sample TTY driver that is present. I believe this is available in %DDKROOT%\Src\Print\Mini\Txtonly.

This article talks more about some update to this driver - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289108

Once you are able to install and run this driver, you should be able to see the main code and add in your own code to get the incoming data and stream it to a file.

Hope this helps. If so, +1 :)

You don't need to modify code to get a driver that can write to a flat file.

A Windows printer driver can be connected to a variety of ports. In particular you can create a Local Port that is actually connected to a file. On the printer's Ports tab, click [Add Port] and then select Local Port and click [New Port]. In the 'Enter port name' edit-text control type the path of the file you want to be filled with PDL data. Then every time you print subsequently, the PDL from the driver will be written to the file associated with the new port, overwriting its previous contents.