The Group files option can be enabled at Control Panel -> Devices and Printers -> right click on Black Ice printer driver and select Printing Preference -> click on the Filename Generation Tab.
Black Ice Software printer drivers can create a Group file at the end of each print job. Group files contain information specific to the print job that was just processed, including the name of the generated output file(s), any errors that occurred during printing, page number, and output file location. Since the group files are standard text files, they can be opened by common applications, such as Notepad. A sample Group file can be found below:
[Black Ice PDF]
Image Format=Portable Document Format (PDF)
Append Image Enabled=Yes
Bits Per Pixel=8
Print status=Printing finished successfully
Document name=MarchNewsletter.pub
Total number of pages=4
[Page 1]
FileName=D:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\Newsletters\March\AAA4C.PDF
Orientation=Portrait
[Page 2]
FileName=D:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\Newsletters\March\AAA4C.PDF
Orientation=Portrait
Group files are particularly useful to application developers for gathering information about printing jobs and passing that information on to their application.
One can determine when the print job is finished or failed by using the “Start Application” feature of the printer driver with the “Start After Printing” option and the Group file is enabled.
For technical details about the “Start Application” feature of the printer driver with the “Start After Printing” option please see the following link.
One can look for the “Print status” value for “Printing finished successfully”:
Print status=Printing finished successfully
Do not open the group file directly; use the GetPrivateProfileString function to read the value:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winbase/nf-winbase-getprivateprofilestring
The group file name can be passed on the command line to an application started by the Black Ice printer driver.
The "Output Filename" sample launched by the demo driver receives the group file name in the command line and displays the name of the generated image files listed in the group file. The resource toolkit contains the full source for the "Output Filename".
The group file can be used to retrieve the name(s) of the generated images. First, the developed application should check for the print status, to see if the document was successfully printed. Next, read the number of total pages from the “Total number of pages=” value. The name of each image is saved to the “FileName” value in the section reserved for the actual page (section [Page 1] for the first page, etc.)
The name of the Group file follows the output filename generation method, but the extension is .grp. For example, if a TEST.DOC is converted with the printer driver, the group file name is TEST.GRP. If the conversion happens more than once or to different file formats, the printer driver does not overwrite the previous group files, instead it appends a number to the filename, for example, TEST (1).GRP, TEST (2).GRP, and so on. In this case, from the group file name it might not be obvious which group file belongs to which conversion. However, the group file itself contains all the necessary information.
Disable Group File
If group files are not needed, please refer to the Disable Group File section.