Question

Copying PDF thru a stream

Asked by: Xexon

Hello everyone,

This question may seem somewhat weird.

We need to be able to setup a printer with a generic text driver that points to a server running a Windows Service (listening on a user-specified port).

The Windows Service simply takes the incoming stream (PDF) and relocates it to a specified folder on the server with a randomized name.

When I send the PDF through the printer, the Windows Service captures the data, but some of the PDF's internal representation is distorted.

For instance,

Original PDF:
===============================================================================================
%PDF-1.4
%âãÏÓ
6 0 obj<</H[936 179]/Linearized 1/E 9848/L 13617/N 1/O 9/T 13451>>
endobj
===============================================================================================

PDF (after being sent thru the socket to the Windows Service)
===============================================================================================
%PDF-1.4
%bcOS
6 0 obj<</H[936 179]/Linearized 1/E 9848/L 13617/N 1/O 9/T 13451>>
endobj
===============================================================================================

The second line marks the differences. There are more differences among the file. These differences are typically in areas that have special characters such as âã--it doesn't seem to be translating
these correctly, and it seems that the PDF has some characters not capable of being expressed in the text file (I guess)--notepad for example, displays certain characters as a block-structure.
Just wondering if anyone had any ideas about this, I really appreciate it.

Thank you :)

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Asked On
2005-06-01 at 13:37:07ID21443793
Topic

Miscellaneous Programming

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
3

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Answers

 

by: cookrePosted on 2005-06-01 at 18:40:27ID: 14127307

Don't use streams, use binary I/O instead.

If you're using basic C, that's open(), read(), and write().
In .NET use BinaryReader and BinaryWriter.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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