Convert printer stream on fly - possible ?

[paulrocch]

hello, we have an program a bit old who print on laser printer a "bill".

The program is very personalized and it is not easy to switch to a new one.

Unfortunately for some parts of this program is no longer possible to make changes.

In particular, the printing of the invoice can no longer change (economically) and unfortunately there are written by the press itself should be removed (a mark, and some of the lines' of text). As well as printing out all right now, you should change it without operator intervention. Now sometimes the print to PDF and modify but it is a long and not practical.

Printing is done on a laser printer (HP, Epson, etc..)

Is possible to intercept the print stream, delete items (always fixed) and printed in a manner transparent to the user to print the invoice?.

I am confused with ghostscript, image file and / or other ways to do this.

In your opinion, what is the best way to change a "stream printing" without user intervention?

Image Magick can be helpful for this problem ?

Thanks in advance for the info .

greetings
Paul Roccheggiani

[snibgo]

ImageMagick can be used to rasterise a PDF (convert it to a bitmap), then white-out parts of that bitmap and insert other elements, such as rasterised text.

This may or may not be a reasonable solution.