Enhanced TWAIN Interface - Programmatically set TWAIN Data Source, support for hundreds of TWAIN capabilities, Callback functions replaced by Windows Messages and a new TWAIN sample.

Black Ice Software provides dynamic image acquisition through TWAIN interface.  Images can be acquired from a variety of TWAIN compatible sources such as scanners and digital cameras.

Scanning support in the Black Ice Development Tools is based on the latest TWAIN 1.9 drivers. With the latest TWAIN drivers, application developers have total control over almost every aspect of the scanning process. Parameters that affect the way that documents are being scanned can be retrieved and changed. Applications can set the brightness and contrast of the scanned documents, can specify the area of the document that should be scanned and they even have control over the resolution and the color depth of the scanned image.

Callback functions replaced by messages

The BiTwain interface sends events in each phase of scanning, enabling more flexible control for the application. Developer's applications will receive a message for each scanning event such as: PageFinished, ScanningDocumentFinished, ScanningError, FeederEmpty, etc. All of these messages can then be processed by the scanning application depending on the actual message received.

Hundreds of capabilities supported

The Black Ice BITWAIN controls support all of the TWAIN 1.9 capabilities. Scanning applications using the BITWAIN controls can retrieve the default values, retrieve the current values and can change the current setting to a specific desired value.

Some of the newly supported capabilities include:

CAP_AUTOFEED
CAP_DUPLEX
CAP_FEEDERENABLED
CAP_FEEDERLOADED
ICAP_BITDEPTH
ICAP_XRESOLUTION
CAP_YRESOLUTION

Using the latest TWAIN 1.9 drivers, applications can even turn on and off the use of the document feeder that some newer scanners have.

For a complete list of the TWAIN capabilities, click here.

Enumerate and Programmatically Select a TWAIN Data Source

The TWAIN Data Source selection can be set programmatically, without any user intervention. the BITWAIN features include retrieving and enumerating the available TWAIN Data Sources and specifying one of the available Data Sources to be used as the current Data Source.

Automated and Batch Scanning Support

One of the most important scanning features is the capability to perform automated scanning. Automated scanning means that applications can do the scanning automatically without any user interaction. The parameters of the scanner can be retrieved and changed programmatically by an application.

Another important feature is the batch scanning capability. Many of today’s modern scanners are equipped with a document feeder and through the document feeder it is possible to scan in hundreds of documents in one single session. The user inserts the documents into the document feeder, starts the scanning process and the scanner will scan the documents one after another.

Black Ice imaging and image processing tools make batch scanning easy. The user simply specifies how many documents he/she wants to scan in, load the documents into the document feeder of the scanner and application will do the rest.  Additionally, batch scanning jobs can be broken up into separate TIFF files based on separator pages, such as blank or black pages, or by detecting barcodes using the Black Ice Barcode SDK/ActiveX

And this is not all. When batch scanning is combined with other powerful Black Ice document imaging features like de-skew, black border removal or punch hole removal, the result will be a totally automated image processing system.

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