How to convert a printer driver to a stand-alone console application which can generate a printer file containing the bytes to be sent to the printer?

Question

I have a situation where the only way to generate a certain datafile is to print it manually to FILE: under Windows and save it in a file for further processing.

Answer 1

I can live with "When a user prints any file to this particular Windows printer, then automatically capture the bytes that would have been sent to the printer".

In that case, you want something like RedMon, which redirects the bytes which would have gone to the printer into the input for another program.