We are looking to create a program that will gather data from stored print spool files stored in a folder, and allow a user to search the data to pick a specific file to preview and possibly print.
Each document that the user will preview/print will also have two supporting files containing the data for the user to search. The files will be distinguished by having the same filename with a different extension for each file.
The first file is an ASCII text file (.cap) in a custom format containing most of the information to be searched. This includes information like username, job name, pages, copies, etc…
The second file is a copy of the Windows Spool Header (.shd) file for the print job that was stored. It may be necessary to extract additional information from this file if it is not available in the .cap file.
The main file will have the extension .spl. It is the raw spool file data, in either Postscript or PCL5/6/XL.
This can be written in any language, though the use of one of the Visual Studio languages is preferred. The target platform is Windows 2000/2003/XP.
To summarize the user experience, they would open the application, browse and sort the information based on what they are looking for, with the option to do a search for specific file data. The could then select a specific file and view a preview of the .spl file, and optionally print it.