QUESTION :
I have an application that recently received a patch that added a page I don’t want to the end of every print job.
Is there a virtual printer that removes the last page, and then prints to the default printer? (Or would this be a question for StackOverflow?)
System: Windows File Format: Propitiatory report generated by
software client
ANSWER :
I am going to assume you are on Windows…
I haven’t tried this myself, but one option might be to use Ghostscript with the Redirection Monitor:
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/redmon/en/redmon19.htm
Configure it NOT to prompt for file names. Now it should be acting as a Windows Print Queue that produces PDFs files.
So now you have your document in PDF format – the next step is to use a command-line tool that can split then rejoin PDF pages. Again, I haven’t tried this, but perhaps you could use the pdftk burst command to split the file, then use the pdftk shuffle to reassemble the pages back into a single doc. You will need some sort of scripting, such as Windows Powershell or Windows Script Host to glue all this together…
http://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-man-page/#dest-op-burst
http://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-man-page/#dest-op-shuffle
This is all extremely kludgy, of course!!
There is no easy way to do this – if there is any way at all. The application is sending the device to the printer. FYI, the “driver” is the printer and the physical printer itself is the print device. Different versions of Windows also handle printing differently, ie PCL, PostScript, GDI, etc…
Your best bet is to change how the application works, not the printing.