Comments by CassinianSoftware (Top 6 by date)

Brilliant, thanks! I think this will fix my issue. Very much appreciate your help. Offhand, do you know of any good third-party reference materials relating to V4 print driver design, other than the documentation Microsoft provides? Because at some point, in the near future I'll need to incorporate some type of UI customization. And, eventually, I'll need to develop a V4 driver with our halftoning engine built in (for printing to non-PostScript machines). I need to find somewhere a crash course on the V4 printer driver framework! :-) Thanks again!

Okay, that makes complete sense. Microsoft could really make its documentation a tad bit more straightforward. If I could, just one more question, regarding adding this file into my project... so let's say my project is called MyPSDriver, and so under "Driver Files" I now have the following:

MyPSDriver.inf
MyPSDriver.ppd
MyPSDriver-manifest.ini
MyPSDriver-PipelineConfig.xml
MyPSDriver-PipelineConfig.xsd

So, is my print capabilities file something like: MyPSDriver-PrintCapabilities.xml?

And then, once that's created, I just add it to my Driver Install->Package Files list, and all should be good, yes? (assuming, of course, I don't muck up the actual format of the file, so I will study the Print Schema spec more closely over the weekend)

Yeah, that was my first thought, too. Microsoft's docs mention an "XML PrintCapabilities Document" which seemed like what I was missing. So I found the PrintCapabilities Document example, which led me to the Print Schema Specification 2.0 reference doc (which I downloaded and read through). But in terms of device color, it only referenced PageOutputColor, and only gave the example for Color or Monochrome. However, after reading your response, I went back through the Print Schema spec and, much to my chagrin, found this... "value corresponds with the color space keywords defined in Table 12 of PWG 5102.4," in reference to PageOutputColor under PwgRasterDocumentType. Duh. So I just went to PWG.org, pulled the spec, and found Table 12. And now, I see that I can specify RGB, CMYK, grayscale, or even N-color configurations. But one question: do you know how I would specify multiple supported color formats for PwgRasterDocumentTypesSupported? In the Print Schema example is the line: <psf2:pwgrasterdocumenttype psf2:pageoutputcolor="psk:Color"> Srgb_8. But a PostScript printer could support multiple color workflows. This particular machine can accept 8 or 16-bit grayscale, RGB, CMYK, or anything up to Device_8. How can I structure the Print Capabilities XML document to ensure the driver presents all valid PageOutputColor options to the application at print time? Thanks!

Yes, that is the manifest I'm using.

With respect to using "one of the Microsoft samples to debug the issue," I'm not sure what you're referring to. The V4 driver template is from Microsoft; I've not added any third-party code. I could acquire a current version of Adobe Illustrator for testing, but I'm not sure what you mean by using a Microsoft sample to debug. Can you elaborate?

I'm using CS5 for testing because I have it available, and because it supports a CMYK workflow for printing. I've not encountered an issue before with CS5 in terms of driver incompatibility, but I suppose I cannot rule it out. I could write my own testbed, but then that opens an interesting question with respect to application compatibility with a V4 driver. Your assertion is that an older application, such as CS5, could be incompatible with the V4 driver framework. That would be worth knowing.

In the meantime, I will test further with the latest Adobe product to see if I can isolate this to a driver incompatibility issue. Thanks.