Printer Driver Tips
Using the Force DPI option
The Black Ice printer drivers support a
wide range of DPI values (resolutions) from 50 up to 3000 DPI.
The printing applications can use any of
the above DPI range to print the documents. Some printing
applications use the system’s default printers’ DPI when a new
document is created, other applications such as Word and Excel
save the printer settings directly into the document when the
document is saved. When the document is printed, the printing
application will try to use the DPI settings saved within the
document, regardless of the DPI settings of the selected
printer, this way trying to make sure that the printed
document will look the same.
If the printer doesn’t support the DPI that
the printing application is using, the application will
reformat the document in order to print it correctly.
If the printer supports the DPI used when
the document was created, the application will print the
document using the DPI values saved in the document, ignoring
the actual DPI setting of the printer.
This behavior of the printing application
can create confusion. For example, if you set the Black Ice
printer to use 300x300 DPI, but your Excel document was
created on a machine where the default printer is set to use
600x600 DPI, Excel will ignore the 300x300 DPI set for the
Black Ice printer and it will print the document with it’s
600x600 DPI resolution. The result is a 600x600 DPI image file
regardless that you set the Black Ice printer to use a
different DPI value.
The solution to this issue is to use the
“Force printer DPI" feature of the Black Ice printer driver.
Using this feature, the output image will always have the
required DPI (resolution) regardless of the printing
application’s and the document’s settings, without even
reformatting the document.
Error number 1796 and 1801.
A few of Black Ice customers have reported
receiving error 1801 (The printer name is invalid.) or error
1796 (The specified port is unknown) during printer driver
installation.
The result of our investigations was that
both issues are connected. When the printer driver is being
installed, the setup will attempt to create a port on the
system. In order to create a new port, the setup must access
specific registry keys.
It turned out, that none of our customers
who experienced this issue had write access to the required
registry keys, even though the user was administrator on the
system. The setup couldn’t write the registry and the
installation failed.
The solution to this issue is to make sure
that you have write access rights enabled for the following
registry keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors\
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows
NT x86\Drivers\Version-2\
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows
NT x86\Print Processors\
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Printers
Print to file option
Printing to the Black Ice driver creates
image files by default. The ‘Print to file’ option is not
supported by the Black Ice printer drivers. Also, if you are
using OLE automation such as automated printing from Word,
Excel or other products, make sure that you are not using the
‘Print to file’ option.
The PrintOut method of the Microsoft Office
products’ OLE object applies to the Application, Document, and
Window objects, and has absolutely nothing to do with the
Black Ice printer drivers. The “OutputFileName"
parameter of the PrintOut method is specific to the printing
application, and it has nothing to do with the name of the
output image file generated by the Black Ice printer driver.
expression.PrintOut(Background,
Append, Range, OutputFileName, From,
To, Item, Copies, Pages,
PageType, PrintToFile, Collate, FileName,
ActivePrinterMacGX, ManualDuplexPrint,
PrintZoomColumn, PrintZoomRow,
PrintZoomPaperWidth, PrintZoomPaperHeight)
By setting the COleVariant("C:\\Test.pdf"),
parameter for the PrintOut method tells the printer to try and
print the document using the “Print to file" option, and the
printing will fail.