New VB Install for the Black Ice
Printer Drivers
Black Ice Software has
recently developed and included a new Visual Basic
install as part of the Resource Toolkit shipped with
every release driver. The new VB install is
provided in addition to the sample Install Shield
script, and is based on the recently added
dInstallBlackIcePrinter function of the Black Ice
printer driver Install DLL.
The purpose of the VB
install is to provide developers with an example of
how to install the Black Ice printer drivers using a
package other than Install Shield. Developers can
use the VB install as a starting point for their own
custom installation, or can convert the VB install
to their programming language of choice, such as C#,
VB .NET, etc.
The new VB install for
the Black Ice printer drivers can easily be
customized to meet a company’s specific need. Since
the VB install calls a single function of the Black
Ice printer driver Install DLL, developers only have
to change the parameters of this one function call
to reflect their specific printer requirements, such
as changing the printer name, port name, printer
driver file names, etc. Developers can change
specific settings of the Black Ice printer drivers
at install time by using the BlackIceDEVMODE DLL or
OCX, or they can customize the ini file (BIMININT,
for example in the case of the Monochrome NT/2000/XP
driver) to install the driver with a specific
configuration as the default settings for all users
of the Black Ice printer driver.
Additionally, the
new VB install for the Black Ice printer drivers
provides a concrete example of how to install
multiple copies of the Black Ice printer drivers on
the same system. Full details on multiple printer
instances are available in the “New
Multiple Printer Driver install for the Black Ice
Printer Drivers" of
this newsletter.
New Multiple Printer Driver install
for the Black Ice Printer Drivers
The Black Ice printer
drivers allow developers to install multiple
instances of the same driver on a single system. In
order to accomplish this, developers must create a
unique set of printer driver files as well as unique
names for each component of the Black Ice printer
driver, such as the printer name, port name, etc.
Included in the new VB
install, which is part of the latest Resource
Toolkits, is an example of how to install multiple
printer driver instances on a single system.
Developers can easily modify the provided two
printer installation to create complex systems of 2
or more Black Ice printer drivers on a single
system.
Since the Black Ice
printer drivers operate just like a “typical"
physical printer, printjobs will be added to the
print queue and processed in the order they arrive.
By using more than one instance of the Black Ice
printer drivers on a single system, developers can
manage multiple printers and process multiple
printjobs at the same time, one printjob for each
printer instance. Additional uses for multiple
printer driver instances is to create a separate
printer driver for each type of output file you will
create. For example, developers can set up one
instance of the new ColorPlus printer driver to
generate PDF files, and a second instance of the
ColorPlus driver to generate JPEG files. You can
specify unique names which identify each printer,
for example, the PDF instance can be named COMPANY
PDF, while the JPEG instance can be COMPANY JPEG.
This way you can instruct end users to print to the
appropriately named driver and they won’t have to
configure the drivers on their own.