ColorPlus PDF Printer Driver for Windows Servers (32 and 64bit)

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Pricing Feature Chart Online Manual Resource Toolkit

The Black Ice ColorPlus printer driver is the complete solution for businesses and developers needing a fast and reliable document conversion tool. The ColorPlus printer driver gives users and developers flexible options to convert, save, email, print, archive or combine their documents. The ColorPlus printer driver converts documents to PDF, TIFF, JPEG, HTML, PNG and many more formats from any Windows application capable of printing. The ColorPlus printer driver is the fastest high-volume conversion utility on the market, while still keeping an easy-to-use human interface for simple file conversion.

The Black Ice ColorPlus printer driver, combined with the Resource Tool Kit – Application Programming Interface (API), offers developers and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM’s) the capability to integrate, customize, or build advanced document management systems. The Resource Tool Kit – API is a collection of utilities and sample source code for sophisticated developers to build state-of-the-art business solutions.

Supported operating systems:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 (64bit)
• Windows Server 2008 (32 and 64bit)
• Windows Server 2003 (32 and 64bit)
• Windows Server 2000
• Citrix XenApp (Citrix Presentation Server)
• Citrix XenDesktop

The printer driver features are grouped into the following main parts:

Each of the above feature groups' settings can be changed from the printer driver's Printing Preferences dialog.

Black Ice Printer Manager (not available in OEM drivers)

The Black Ice Printer Manager was introduced in version 12.00 of the Black Ice Printer Drivers and is a central management tool for the Black Ice Printer Drivers. The Printer Manager allows easy configuration of the most frequently used printer settings including output folder, post-printing options, email settings, conversion profiles and provides direct integration with Microsoft SharePoint® as well.

Agent Printers can be set up in the Black Ice Printer Manager to handle routine tasks, like creating and emailing PDF reports, labeling legal documents, creating faxable documents or uploading to SharePoint without having to repeat printer configuration steps each time.

Read more about Black Ice Printer Manager features...

The Device Settings

Paper Size

The ColorPlus printer driver supports a total of 177 predefined paper sizes.

• 45 standard paper (page) sizes are supported.
• 36 Advanced paper sizes are supported, including the A0 Engineering paper size.
• 3 Black Ice paper sizes, such as User-selectable variable (custom) paper size specified in inches or millimeters, fax paper size and variable paper size in pixels.
• Users can add new paper sizes, customize existing paper sizes, and remove unwanted paper sizes.

Force Fax Resolution

Select this option to force the ColorPlus printer driver to generate faxable images, regardless of the settings of the printing application. Faxable images must have 204x98 or 204x196 DPI resolution and must have a 1728 pixel width. The Black Ice Printer will generate the output image with the required parameters, therefore no further modification of the image will be necessary in order to fax the image.

Page Orientation

Besides the traditional Portrait and Landscape orientations, Black Ice ColorPlus printers support the "Rotate landscape image to portrait" option too. This feature is very handy when landscape oriented documents need to be faxed.

By using this option, the document will be printed using the landscape orientation and then the image will be rotated to portrait orientation and is ready to be faxed.

Graphic resolutions

The Black Ice ColorPlus Printer Drivers support for the following resolutions:

• 100 x 100 DPI
• 200 x 200 DPI
• 204 x 98 DPI - the Standard FAX mode (Draft)
• 204 x 196 DPI - the Fine FAX mode (Low)
• 300 x 300 DPI
• 600 x 600 DPI
• Custom resolution - up to 3000x3000 DPI

The custom resolution can be set to any value ( horizontal and vertical ) up to 3000 x 3000 DPI and not less then 50 x 50 DPI

File Formats Settings

Use these settings to specify the output file format for the ColorPlus printer driver to generate. The printed documents will be converted to images which will be stored in the selected format

File Format

Printed documents can be converted into the following formats:

Create file in memory

By using this option all images will be created in memory. An application can receive the image created in the memory by the printer driver using the printer driver's messaging interface.

Color Depth

The ColorPlus printer driver can convert the printed documents into 24 bit (true color), 8 bit (256 color or grayscale) or 1 bit (monochrome) images.

Save each page as separate file - Multipage file support

The Black Ice ColorPlus printer driver can convert multipage documents in one of two ways: by generating one separate image file for each page, or by generating one single multipage TIFF or DCX file. Using the multipage file support, all pages from the source document will be stored in the same image file.

Extract text to file - Generate text output

If the source document contains text information, the printer driver can extract and save the text from the document in a separate text file in addition to creating the image file(s). Click Here for additional text extraction information.

Save position and style - for text output

This powerful feature allows exact reconstruction of a document. When this option is selected, the exact position of the text and the font information from the source document will be saved in a text file.

Mail Merge

The mail merge feature is available in the printer driver, call for details.

Photo Quality (Dithering)

In order to convert color documents into monochrome (black and white) or 8 bit (256 color) images, several dithering methods are available and can be used. The Color printer driver support seven different dithering methods.

• Disable Photo Quality (default dithering, recommended for text documents)
• Jarvis-Judice-Ninke
• Floyd-Steinberg
• Sharp
• Smooth
• Stucki
• Threshold

The size and appearance of the generated image will vary depending on which dithering method is used.

Filename Generation Settings

The Filename generation settings allow the name of the generated images to be specified.

Enable Save As Option - prompt for file name before saving

When the ‘Enable Save As' option’ is selected, the Save As Dialog will be displayed each time before printing the file. The Black Ice Save As Dialog is very similar to the regular Windows Save As Dialog, except it contains additional Black Ice options.

The Black Ice printer driver supports seven different filename generation methods:

These filename generation methods provide huge flexibility to the application which integrates the printer driver.

• Use the document name: The driver will use the document name which the application passes to the driver when generating the name of the output image.
• Custom file name generation: The custom file naming option lets you build up a custom file naming scheme from predefined tags. File names can even contain dynamic information (For example: time of conversion, date of conversion, user or computer names, page number and custom text string).
  Custom file naming is especially useful when the conversion results in multiple documents.
• Use the prefix and extension: the output filename will be generated from random characters. The first three characters will be the characters specified in the ‘Filename Prefix’ edit box and random numbers will be added.
• Prefix and extension from the registry: The file name prefix and the extension will be read from the specified registry key.
• Prefix and extension from the INI file: In this case the filename and the prefix will be read from the specified INI file. The driver will search in the INI file for a printer name section. Use the “File Name Prefix" key for the file prefix and the “File Name extension" key for the extension.
• Exact filename: The printed file will be generated with the exact name as specified in the ‘Enter the filename’ edit box.
• Exact filename from the registry: The filename will be read from the specified registry key.
• Exact filename from the INI file: In this case the filename will be read from the specified INI file.

Output Directory

The printer driver will generate the image file(s) in the specified folder. This folder can be on the local hard drive, can be a mapped network drive, or it can be a folder on another computer.

On Terminal Servers the user can specify an environment variable which contains a directory path. The environment variable name must be between “<<" and “>>" marks. I.e.: <<TEMP>>. The printer driver will use the value from the environment variable as the output directory. This environment variable should be specified for each user by the system administrator. The system administrator can add to the autoexec.bat the a SET command which uses the %USER% environment variable so this path will be unique for each user. I.e.:

SET TEMP=C:\Temp\%USER%

I.e. to specify the TEMP environment variable as output directory enter in this field: <<TEMP>>

Note: If the specified environment variable is not found the printer driver will use by default the temp directory of the actual user to generate the image files.

Group File Options

For every print job (printed document) the printer driver creates a "group file". The group file contains information about the generated image, including the name of the document, the full path and file name for each page, the image format, color depth, paper size, orientation, and printing status.

Delete the group file after printing - The printer driver will automatically delete the group file at the end of the printing. Applications can still use the information from the group file during printing.

Disable group file generation - If it is not needed, the group file generation can be turned off.

SharePoint®

Enabling the "upload to SharePoint®" checkbox will cause the generated output to be automatically uploaded to a designated SharePoint Server. Optionally the upload can be configured to run in the background by selecting silent mode. Read more about uploading files to SharePoint®...

Start Application Settings

One of the features of the Black Ice printer drivers is that the printer driver can start an application before or after printing. If the application is started before the printing starts, the applications can wait for the messages sent by the printer driver. When the application is started after the printing has finished, a custom application can read the command line parameters of the generated group file, which will contain all of the necessary information about the generated images.

The order of the parameters passed to the started application can be changed, and unnecessary parameters can be removed from the parameter list.

Besides the starting an application after printing, there are two other post-printing options: Open output folder opens the folder which contains the output file. Open printed document using the default viewer will open the output file in the default viewer, e.g. a PDF file will be opened immediately after the conversion is finished by the default PDF viewer.

Watermark Settings

Add a watermark image to every printed document using the Print Watermark feature of the Black Ice printer drivers. The selected image (your company logo, signature, etc.) will show up automatically on the generated images.

• Watermark image file: If needed, two different watermark images can be specified for portrait and landscape orientation images.
• Position: The watermark can be placed on the document using four options:
  • Stretched to fit the document
  • Stretched to the document's width
  • Centered on the document
  • Tile
• Brightness: controls the visibility of the watermark image on the original document.

The watermark is always in the background, so the document's text and images are clearly visible.

Embedded Annotation Settings

It is possible to define a custom annotation text that will be placed on every printed page. The annotation text can also contain the current date and/or the time. The format of the date and time, the position of the annotation text on the page, and the font used to print the annotation can be fully customized. The Black Ice printer drivers can also add user specific annotations such as the printing user name, computer name, IP Address, etc. which can be specified using predefined fields and environment variables.

Profile Manager

A printer driver profile stores every printer setting at a given moment. This means that one can have separate profiles for different applications and switching from one application to another means that another printer driver profile should be loaded. Users do not have to know what settings the application requires and they do not have to make printer settings changes manually. They simply select another profile from the profile list and the printer driver will make all the necessary changes automatically.

Bates Numbering

Bates numbering is a unified way to refer to and track documents and pages by number rather than name. Bates number is normally a series of letters followed by sequential numbers which are incremented for each printed page. Bates Numbering is mostly used by law firms to aid in the referencing of documents.

The Bates Numbering provided by Black Ice Software is composed of two components: prefix and number. The prefix can be any string including letters and numbers, such as a case number, client name, etc. The second part of the Bates Number, the actual number, will be incremented for each printed page. The user can specify a starting number that will be incremented by the driver automatically for each printed page.

Advanced features and technologies

Black Ice printer drivers support several features and technologies that no other printer driver vendor supports. In order to make use of these technologies, there are several applications included in the Resource Toolkit that demonstrate these features.

The following list enumerates these Black Ice specific technologies. Please click on the links below to get more information about these features.