How to intercept jobs sent for printing?

Question

Python

Good day.
There was a need to track what our users print. Printers are different, some print via usb, some through the network. The following information is of interest: a preview or a complete document that was sent for printing and the number of pages in the job. The process should be transparent to the user - there is a need to use settings for paper type, profile, etc., so a virtual printer is not desirable.
It is desirable that this could be implemented in scripting languages, preferably python.
For now, I’m more interested in how to do this under Windows, but I’ll also be grateful for information on how to do this under Linux.

Answer 1

You can try to monitor the System32\spool\PRINTERS folder, print jobs in the SPL spooler format should be placed there. You can look at the description of the format, for example, here www.undocprint.org/formats/winspool/spl
It may be possible to extract the necessary information from the SPL.

Answer 2

You need a DLP solution. We can do without names, but there are opensource solutions, I didn’t test it myself, I won’t give feedback on them.