Printer Driver Resource Toolkit DEMO

If you have downloaded one of our 32 bit free Printer Driver DEMO packages, then you may want to think about trying out our 32 bit Printer Driver Resource Toolkit (RTK) DEMO as well! This software package will assist 32 bit Black Ice Printer Driver DEMO users to accomplish printing and Black Ice Printer Driver related tasks.

Note: The 64 bit DEMO Resource Toolkit is only available upon request. Please email Sales@Blackice.com or call our sales department at 603-673-1019 Ext 2 to inquire about getting a 64 bit RTK DEMO.

The Printer Driver Resource Toolkit DEMO includes a variety of sample applications with full source code (some have been removed from the DEMO version), written in C, C++, Visual Basic, and Delphi. It is also .NET compatible and includes samples written in C#, VB .NET, and J#. The DEMO version does not included sample installation scripts but does have many other tools that can reduce development time and make applications development with the Black Ice Printer Drivers much easier.

Visual Studio 2005, and VB.NET 8.0 support has been added.

NOTE: The Printer Driver Resource Toolkit DEMO does not include the following that are included with the full release:

     - The Printer Driver install samples.
     - The following sample source codes have been removed from every language:
              - AutoPrint
              - BatchConverter
              - PrintJobControl
              - E-Mail Add-on
              - Print2FTP

The tools and samples included in the Resource Toolkit DEMO will help in the following areas:

- Programmatically Change Printer Settings
- Programmatically Control and Query Print Jobs
- Printing Without User Interaction
- Integrate the Printer Driver Into an Application
- Provide Access to Features and Technologies Available with Black Ice Products Only
- Sample Comparison Chart

Programmatically Change Printer Settings.

Black Ice printer drivers have many settings that affect the way documents are going to be printed. These printer settings can be changed manually through the printer driver's user interface or programmatically from an application without any user interaction.

The Resource Toolkit DEMO includes a powerful API (a DLL for C/C++ and an ActiveX control for VB, Delphi, C#, etc) that contains over 300 easy to use functions to control printer driver settings.

Typically, VB environments do not provide any programming capability to change printer settings. However, the Resource Toolkit includes an ActiveX control which is unique in that it allows printer manipulation through VB and it is available only for Black Ice Printer Drivers.

There are several samples (more in the full release version) included with full source code written in C, C++, VB, VB .NET, C#, J# and Delphi that show how to change printer settings.

The samples were built with Visual C++ 6.0, Visual Basic 6, Visual Studio .NET and Delphi 5.

Printing Without User Interaction.

The Print Job Control functionality included in the Resource Toolkit DEMO contains features like pausing, restarting and deleting print jobs. Developers can get a list of the current print jobs, then pause or delete any print jobs they need to control. Developers can also query the total number of print jobs for the specified printer and the status of each specified job to see if the job is printing, paused, etc.

Additional print job specific information that can be retrieved from the Black Ice printers includes:

• The name of the machine that created the print job

• The name of the user that owns the print job

• The name of the print job (the document name, for example, "MS-WORD: Review.doc")

• The job’s priority

• The job's position in the print queue

• Total number of pages in the document

• The number of pages that have printed

• The time the job was submitted

Printing Without User Interaction.

The Resource Toolkit DEMO for the Black Ice printer driver demos contains two sample applications which demonstrate how to programmatically print to the Black Ice printer drivers.  The sample applications demonstrate how to programmatically print common file types, such as Microsoft Office and PDF files.

NOTE- The source code for these sample applications are only available in the full release version of the Resource Toolkit.

Integrate the Printer Driver Into an Application.

When the printer driver is used as a part of an application, there are several ways to allow the application to communicate with the printer driver.

The printer driver can communicate with the application in a number of ways:

• The application can capture printer driver messages sent by the printer driver's messaging interface

• The application can check the content of the group file generated by the printer driver

• The printer driver can start the application and pass command line parameters

The Printer Driver Resource Toolkit DEMO includes samples with full source code written in several programming languages which demonstrate every aspect of the printer driver integration. These samples can be used as a starting point in the printer driver integration process and they can be easily modified to accomplish application specific tasks.

For additional information about printer driver integration, please click on the links above.

Provide Access to Features and Technologies Available with Black Ice Products Only

Black Ice printer drivers support several features and technologies that no other printer driver vendor supports. In order to make use of these technologies, there are several applications included in the Resource Toolkit DEMO that demonstrate these features.

The following list enumerates these Black Ice specific technologies. Please click on the links below to get more information about these features.

• Redirect Printing

• Auto-Print (no sample source code included)

• Batch Converter (no sample source code included)

• Real Time Printer Driver Hook

• Form Reconstruction

Additional Samples Provided

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