Q: After researching the web; I believe you have a Virtual Printer SDK
product for which I have not managed to find information on your
website? I am looking for features/benefits/price etc.
I have project whereby a user could print any document to PDF but the
virtual printer driver must show a preview of the first page with an
outline of the envelope window size to show if the address would fall
out; it must also prompt some basic questions. On printing, a pdf
would be created with an xml file of the selected options. Is this
something I could achieve with PDFTron and the virtual printer driver?
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A: You can use PDFNet along with the Virtual Driver SDK to implement
the required solution.
PDFNet SDK (http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet) comes with a built-in
virtual driver (e.g. Convert sample - http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/samplecode.html#Convert),
however this default driver does not have any GUI (it is primarily
used for programmatic conversion).
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++ and depends on
WDK (Widows Driver Kit). There is no additional API or significant
documentation beyond what is included as part of WDK and PDFNet. The
sample driver is using PDFNet SDK for conversion (i.e.
pdftron.PDF.Convert.ToPDF()) and mainly deals with UI and driver
configuration. Because of its form, we can’t provide with an
evaluation version except for the precompiled driver. A bit outdated,
pre-compiled sample driver based on the 'Virtual Driver SDK' is
available from the following location:
https://www.pdftron.com/downloads/PDFTronCreator32.exe
https://www.pdftron.com/downloads/PDFTronCreator64.exe
The drivers are supported on all 32 and 64-bit Windows XP, Vista,
Windows 7, Windows 2003 Server, and Windows 2008 Server.
The licensing for PDFTron Virtual Driver SDK is based on OEM/
Redistributable model (http://www.pdftron.com/store/licensing.html, to
apply please fill out: http://www.pdftron.com/store/oem.html).
Because the driver supports XPS Print path it has many advantages over
legacy GDI printer drivers. For example, current MS Office
applications or any .NET/WPF application will take advantage of the
XPS print path to produce higher-quality output (http://blogs.msdn.com/
b/xps/archive/2009/07/23/new-office-2010-printing-functionality.aspx).
virtual printer driver must show a preview of the first page with an outline of the envelope
window size to show if the address would fall out
PDFNet also includes API visualization of spool job before conversion
to PDF (as well as rendering of generated PDF itself - i.e.
pdftron.PDF.PDFDraw; and the entire PDFNet API - http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/apiref.html),
so this should not be a problem.