How It Works

When a print job is sent to the PDF Writer it will be handled by a Postscript printer driver. This driver sends the Postscript print job to the print queue. The print queue is handled by the Spooler service. Each PDF Writer print job is sent to a virtual printer port. The port will pick up the Postscript and convert it to a PDF or another type of document.

In order for the port to make the conversion from Postscript to a PDF or an image file format, it will need a converter. The most commonly used converter is Ghostscript. However, the PDF Writer can also use other converters such as the Normalizer from Datalogics.

The converter is not needed if you only wish to capture the raw postscript and do the processing or conversion yourself. This could be the case if you are redistributing the PDF Writer in a scenario where you upload the print jobs to a server on the Internet for later processing. Some Internet FAX solutions have been implemented that way.

If you want the PDF Write to output a PDF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, EPS or other document type which is not Postscript then you need a converter installed. The converter must be installed on the same computer as the PDF Writer. Converters are not part of the bioPDF software and they have separate licensing models. Please read the license information on the converter that you plan to use or redistribute.