Hi,
Will be a pleasure to work in this project for you. I have a long experience in printer driver products, you could check that going for just a second to my work history. I can provide you the best options for your requirements.
Win 8 is very problematic for printer drivers. A detail is that it dont allow installations of not signed printer drivers if you dont boot with "allow unsigned drivers" option.
I have been porting all my printers to XPS pipeline filters in the last year and then in a user mode application(c#) trasnforming this xps to any format, ex: pdf, bmp, jpeg, tiff, etc.
Best regards,
SysSoftw