Explosive New Printer Driver Feature
- Ignore Application Devmode
Some printing
applications, most noticeably Microsoft Office
products, will store printer settings in the
document itself and will ignore the current printer
settings in favor of the stored settings. Newly
released version 9.40 of the Black Ice printer
drivers includes a new feature which will forever
eliminate this issue, the new Ignore Application
Devmode feature.
Using the Ignore
Application Devmode will instruct the Black Ice
printer driver to ignore the Black Ice specific
setting received from the printing application such
as image file format, output directory, start
application parameter, etc. No longer do developers
have to worry about printing applications overriding
or ignoring their specific Black Ice printer driver
settings.
The non Black Ice
specific settings such as paper size, DPI and
orientation will be applied as passed from the
application in order to allow the printing
application to correctly format the document for
printing.
How to enable Ignore
Application Devmode
Enter the following into
the printer driver’s INI file:
[Default Settings]
Ignore Application Devmode=1
If the value is 0 or
missing, the driver will use the devmode provided by
the printing application. If the value is set to 1,
the settings provided by the printing application
will be ignored, and the printing user's settings
will be used.
The computer must be
restarted in order to use the new value if this
setting has been changed.
When is this
helpful?
One issue that many
printing users have struggled with has been
overriding printer settings stored within a
document. This issue is most commonly faced when
using applications such as Microsoft Word or Excel.
The Black Ice printer drivers are often used in
third party application which either expect or
require a specific DPI, such as faxing or document
imaging applications.
When an application
stores printer settings within a document, the DPI
settings stored are taken from the default printer
at the time that the document was created. In most
cases, the stored DPI settings will not be the
setting required by the target application.
The Black Ice printer
drivers include a feature which will force the final
output file to have a specific DPI setting,
regardless of what the printing application uses for
a DPI value. This way, if the application prints at
600 DPI, the Black Ice printer can scale the
resulting image to the value specified with the
Force DPI option.
However, if the Force DPI
option is not set, or not stored in the devmode
saved in the printed document, developers were at
the mercy of the printing application. Until now…
With the addition of the
new Ignore Application Devmode feature, developers
can set the Black Ice printer driver to ignore the
Black Ice settings stored in the document and use a
set of specifically defined values provided by the
developers. This way, developers can override the
stored values and can ensure the Force DPI option
will be used along with the DPI value required by
their application.