We have a legacy application written by a developer which takes a PDF/text file and converts it to a TIFF. The user just prints the file to a custom print driver.Output of the driver is a Printer control language file and finally TIFF.
The user doesn't see the PCL file. PCL file is internally produced and inputed as a binary reader which gets converted to a TIFF.
How do I see the PCL File?? I would really like to have a small stand-alone test program which converts a PDF to PCl using this print driver and then TIFF. The print driver is written in C, C++ code.
This driver was written in 2010. With the new Adobe version 2018.009.20050, text in adobe forms is not being captured.
I'd appreciate some pointers!
I do not have an answer but I wish to comment and follow the topic.
Like the poster, I'm working with a few virtual print drivers and have noted this change of behavior from Adobe Reader 2018.009.20050 is impacting them. Examples: Foxit's PDF Printer, as well as an HP PostScript Driver I've been using whenever I need to redirect a printstream to a file.
The issue seems to be that the new release of Adobe Reader is no longer recognizing these PostScript printers as such. A tell-tale sign is that Adobe Reader, when printing, has 'Advanced' options that would typically let someone designate some PostScript options/preferences. With the recent Reader release, these options are now disabled for all of my PostScript-capable printers, except when using the "Adobe PDF Printer".
My guess: like many Windows applications, when Adobe Reader prints to a device that it thinks is NOT PostScript-capable, Reader will choose to rasterize the PDF's text into image/vector data, rather than expressing it as text-and-font information. ( ..and some applications, like Chrome, seem to always do this, nevermind the type of printer. )
I am hoping that Adobe sees a bug here to be fixed soon. It's creating quite a headache otherwise.
In the meantime, I've found that Foxit's most-recent PDF Reader does NOT have this same issue. It continues to create PostScript for my set of virtual printers.
UPDATE (1/2/18): This is Adobe's support article describing a different issue but the same proposed registry change for avoiding text rasterization.