Virtual Printer Driver

To some extent, a driver represents an extension of the operating system (OS) for a certain device (e.g. a printer or a computer screen), in other words, a software which adjusts the OS data for the hardware device.

(You may ask yourself, if it would be easier to embed the drivers into the OS, instead of having to add dozens of drivers to the system later on. However, these extensions are necessary because at the time, when the OS was created and programmed, no one could have possibly foreseen which devices each single computer equipped with this operating system would have to work with. For the reason alone, that most of the devices have been developed and brought on the market only after the operating system has been finalized – for example, Windows 2000 could not possibly predict the requirements of a printer brought on the market in 2004).

A Virtual Printer Driver – literally, should be called a “driver for a virtual printing device”- differs from usual printer drivers by the fact that it does not pass the graphical data of a document supposed to be printed, but saves the data as image file to hard disk. So when printing in MS Word document (*.doc) or a PowerPoint presentation (*.ppt), the image will not be sent to the printer, but saved on the hard disk.

In this manner you will obtain exposure-ready image data from all the PC programs /applications, as EXTIF pro is, a driver i.e. an extension of the operating system, and not a PC application / program.