Virtual(ly numberless) printers
I noticed in Chris Pratley's Weblog a post about a new virtual printer for OneNote. I haven't had a chance to evaluate the item yet (my Add Printer wizard is choking on it), but I do have some reservations about this new powertoy. Rewind...
In a galaxy far far away, I designed the virtual printer for Windows Journal for the Tablet PC, known as Journal NoteWriter. A closely linked group were also creating the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer, which is installed with Office XP and Office 2003. Similar imaging/printing/compression technology, incompatible output.
Virtual printers are not new. A full copy of Adobe Acrobat will give you the PDFwriter and Distiller. There are various free and paid-for TIFF/JPEG/younameit printers on the market that can be found littered across the information superhighway.
So now a fully equipped business user with a Tablet PC, Office and Acrobat may find their Print dialog has the following vitual printers and outputs:
Journal NoteWriter -> JNT
Microsoft Office Document Image Writer -> .MOD, .TIFF
Adobe PDFwriter -> PDF
Adobe Distiller -> PDF
and we have a new kid on the block with the OneNote driver. Oh, and I can ink on the output of three of these drivers but there is no clipboard or file-level compatibility for this stuff, even with the Microsoft-owned part of the corral.
I've seen generic attempts for Windows Longhorn, but no attempt to clean up this mess. Print automation is still a bitch as directing print output to a non-default printer in Windows is kind of tricky. Legacy issues with Office printing, handling of Outlook attachments etc adds to the pain.
I hope this problem has an owner at Microsoft. Every new virtual printer adds legacy problems.