RedMon - Redirection Port Monitor

Transparent PostScript printing from Windows 95/98 and NT.

Overview

The RedMon port monitor redirects a special printer port to a program. RedMon is commonly used with Ghostscript and a non-PostScript printer to emulate a PostScript printer.

RedMon can be used with any program that accepts data on standard input.

Using RedMon you create a redirected printer port. If you connect a Windows printer driver to the redirected printer port, all data sent to the redirected port will be forwarded by RedMon to the standard input of a program. The output of this program can be sent to different printer port, or the program can generate whatever output it desires.

A PostScript Windows printer redirected to a RedMon port can shared on a network. When this printer is configured to use Ghostscript and a non-PostScript printer, it appears as a PostScript printer to other network clients.

RedMon can also be used with an lpr client to provide transparent access to printers on Unix hosts. This is useful under Windows 95/98. Windows NT already has an lpr port monitor so there is no point in using RedMon for this. Another alternative is to use RedMon with PrintGLN, an HPGL pen plotter emulator.

The RedMon online help is available in English, French, German, and Swedish.

If you use the Ghostscript mswinpr2 device with RedMon under Windows NT, please read these notes.

Availability

RedMon version 1.7 can be downloaded from ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/ghostgum/redmon17.zip. Translations (possibly incomplete) for German, French, and Swedish are also available. Source code is included. The RedMon licence requires that you include the source if you redistribute RedMon.

All user text is stored in language specific resources. Translating RedMon to another language should be straightforward. Contact the author if you want to translate RedMon into your language.

Known issues

• User interface is unfriendly.
• On Windows Terminal Server or Windows XP with fast user switching, the "Prompt for filename" dialog will appear on the console or first session, not the current session. If you know how to set the session for displaying windows, please send me email.
• Writing files to network shares may not work. Using "Run as user" may fix this.
• Environment variables are not replaced in the program arguments. One workaround may be to use the command interpreter as the redirection program, "/c file.bat" as the arguments, then use %REDMON_USER% etc. within the batch file.
• Windows 2000 and XP have a job name as the document title, not the original document name. This is not something that can be fixed in RedMon.
• gsprint can't find any printers because RedMon runs as the default user which doesn't have any printers. Copy the printer configuration in the registry from the current user to the default user. This problem is related to using mswinpr2 on Windows NT.

Proposed changes in next version

• Proposed release date is mid 2005.
• x64 build (Windows XP Professional x64 Edition).
• Display "Prompt for filename" dialog in the correct session.
• Expand environment variables in program arguments.
• Configure RedMon port from another program.
• Extra installer that installs RedMon and configures a port as a Ghostscript PDF writer.
• Remove all the images of dialog boxes from the help file, because these are from old versions of Windows.
• Please contact the author if you have other suggestions.

Non-Windows equivalents

For OS/2, use Printmon.

For Unix, see The Linux Printing HOWTO for details of how to set up a Magicfilter.