Making a soft copy(file) of everything printed to any printer from a Windows workstation?

I have been looking into the开发者_JAVA百科 possibility of creating a soft copy(image/EMF file) of everything printed from Windows - for archival purposes. Does anyone know if it is possible to create a hooking DLL that can grab the printed data in such a general way?

A low tech way of solving it might be to install pdf printer driver as the default printer and remove all others and set it up to automatically write all the files to certain directory on the network and then write a tiny app on another computer to monitor that folder for changes and if any new pdfs appear just print them out to a real printer.

Edit: Otherwise there's apparently something called the Print Monitor API. Here's an article that describes using that from VC++ 6 and seems to be pretty much what you want (assuming it's still supported by the OS you use).

Having looked at this problem in more detail the best solution seems to handle it through Spooler notifications in the Win32.