Anybody familiar with the details of implementing the Adobe PDF virtual printer?

Question

Hello, all.
We need to implement a virtual printer similar to the legendary one by Adobe. The images processed by it will be detailed CAD drawing.
Can a kind soul point me in the appropriate direction? For starters: what type of data (what format) is the virtual printer expected to receive?
This will be for Windows.
TIA,
-RFH

Answer 1

Well... it isn't really a data format. A device driver (which includes a printer driver) provides a number of callbacks which correspond to the graphical calls made by a printing program. (At least, that's how it was when I looked into it a very long time ago). A driver might be asked to draw lines or boxes, to output text with particular fonts and attributes, or to accept a variety of raster graphics. This is something for an experienced programmer, or team, already very familiar with Windows graphic models such as GDI: device drivers are not easy to develop or debug, and because they run with special privileges; bugs in them have the potential to completely crash the system (blue screen of death) (although I read of something called "user mode drivers" which might be safer).
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg463348.aspx is a place where some of this seems to be discussed. I don't know whether you have to sign up with Microsoft. You might, because recent OSs will only install signed drivers.
Updated: if you still want to make a PDF, this is an enormous task, so big that Adobe dropped the two drivers they once had. Adobe don't even write the Adobe PDF driver. Rather, they use the operating system's PostScript driver, then convert PostScript to PDF using Distiller, a tool they conveniently already had. Adobe provide what I think is called a "print monitor" (?) that takes the output from the driver once it is fully formatted. If you can process PostScript you could do the same. (Note: a PostScript interpreter from scratch is a considerably larger task than a print driver, so that isn't an easy option; look at 5-10 person years if the people are sufficiently skilled).