Black Ice printer drivers create group files at the end of each print job. Group files contain information specific to the print job that was just processed, including the name of the generated output file(s), any errors that occurred during printing, and specifics about the print job. Since the group files are standard text files, they can be opened by common applications, such as Notepad. A sample Group file can be found below:
[Black Ice PDF]
Image Format=Portable Document Format (PDF)
Append Image Enabled=Yes
Bits Per Pixel=8
Print status=Printing finished successfully
Document name=MarchNewsletter.pub
Number of Copies=2
Total number of pages=4
[Page 1]
FileName=D:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\Newsletters\March\AAA4C.PDF
Orientation=Portrait
[Page 2]
FileName=D:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\Newsletters\March\AAA4C.PDF
Orientation=Portrait
Group files are particularly useful to application developers for gathering information about printing jobs and passing that information on to their application.
The group file name can be passed on the command line to an application started by the Black Ice printer driver.
The "Output Filename" sample launched by the demo driver receives the group file name in the command line and displays the name of the generated image files listed in the group file. The resource toolkit contains the full source for the "Output Filename".
The group file can be used to retrieve the name(s) of the generated images. First, the developed application should check for the print status, to see if the document was successfully printed. Next, read the number of total pages from the “Total number of pages=” value. The name of each image is saved to the “FileName” value in the section reserved for the actual page (section [Page 1] for the first page, etc.)
The name of the Group file follows the output filename generation method, but the extension is .grp. For example, if a TEST.DOC is converted with the printer driver, the group file name is TEST.GRP. If the conversion happens more than once or to different file formats, the printer driver does not overwrite the previous group files, instead it appends a number to the filename, for example, TEST (1).GRP, TEST (2).GRP, and so on. In this case, from the group file name it might not be obvious which group file belongs to which conversion. However, the group file itself contains all the necessary information.
If this option is checked, the driver generates the group files.
The Black Ice printer drivers create group files at the end of each print job. Group files contain information specific to the print job which was just processed, including the name of the generated output file(s), any errors that occurred during printing, and specifics about the print job. Since the group files are standard text files, they can be opened by common applications such as notepad.
The group file name is the same as the generated image file name (with a .GRP extension) and it is in the same directory as the generated image file.
For example, if a TEST.DOC is converted with the printer driver, the group file name will be TEST.GRP. If the conversion happens more than once or to different file formats, the printer driver will not overwrite the previous group files, instead it will append a number to the filename, e.g. TEST (1).GRP, TEST (2).GRP etc. In this case from the group file name it might not be obvious which group file belongs to which conversion.
NOTE: In the Black Ice printer drivers the group files are disabled by default.