(Printer Drivers - Continued from page 1)

Custom command line parameters.

Black Ice printer drivers are capable of launching an application and passing command line parameters to the launched application. Command line parameters contain print job related information like document name, printer name, generated image and group file names, etc, however the number, the order and the content of the command line parameters passed to the application is hard coded and cannot be changed.

To make the process of launching applications more flexible, the newest version of the Black Ice printer drivers allow users to specify which command line parameters they want to pass to the application and in what order. With this addition, Black Ice printer drivers can easily integrate with existing applications like image viewers, editors etc. by passing only the parameters that the given application expects.

Easily restore printer defaults.

In some cases, printer driver users may want to reset printer settings to the original values that were set when the printer driver was installed. By doing this, users can easily fix problems that are caused by some incorrect printer setting modifications.

 To address this issue, the latest version of the Black Ice printer drivers have a “Restore defaults" button available on the printer driver user interface. By pressing this button the printer driver will reset all its settings to the original values that were set at installation time.

Restrict available file formats from the printer driver’s INI file

The latest version of the Black Ice printer drivers allow developers and printer driver users to control the list of file formats that are displayed in the printer driver user interface by modifying the printer driver’s INI file. By limiting the number of available formats, the user will be limited to select from a limited number of file formats that are compatible with the developer’s application and this way limiting possible file incompatibilities.

Pass TIFF DIB in memory

In response to customer requests, Black Ice printer drivers are now capable of generating TIFF images and DIBs (Device Independent Bitmaps) in memory and pass image data to an application that integrates with the printer driver.

Some applications do not want to save the generated images to a file and in these cases this new feature provides an easy to implement solution. The application does not have to retrieve the image file name through the printer driver’s messaging interface or from the group file, it will simply capture the image data from the printer driver and the image is ready to be processed.

(Document Imaging - Continued from page 2)

Color conversion functions implement features that change the way how colors are represented in images. Today’s devices represent colors in many different ways. Some devices like printers accept 1 bit monochrome images, others accept 24 bit full color images. But there is a difference also in the method how colors are encoded. Some devices, like display devices work with RGB colors. Others use CMYK colors.

The Document Imaging SDK/ActiveX makes it easy to convert between different color depths and color spaces. There are nine dithering methods available and the SDK can convert between nine color spaces easily.

Image processing functions are used to make images look better or correct and remove visual artifacts from images. These image processing feature are sometimes use together with filters and effects to produce better results. The Document Imaging SDK implement several image processing methods that can provide solutions to problems that happen mostly during faxing or scanning. Just to enumerate a few of the algorithms, there are skew, de-skew algorithms available, there is an automatic black border remover, punch hole remover and clean image algorithm available.

In the following issues of the Black Ice Newsletter we will present several Document Imaging SDK/ActiveX features in more detail. We will also illustrate different areas  of application for these features.