Looking for TIF-printer-driver

[Peter2]

For creating one-sided, "great-paper size" plans with CAD I'm looking for a TIF-printer-driver with this functions:

- different compression types
- Black/white 90% importance, greytones 5%, colur 5%
- resolution 400 dpi, more than 600 dpi not necessary
- papersize 90cm x 400 (-500 cm)
- metadata (author, comment, .. - if possible???)
- able to use it in batch mode (command line parameters?) where no dialogue is necessary
- intelligent file-name-management for auto-save (name of the CAD-file is the base for the name of the TIF-file)
- (others: ???)

What can you recommend? What are your experiences?

Peter

[Peter2]

Nobody who knows?

Peter

[helmut]

Some months ago, I was searching the web for such an Image printer. My intention was printing out address lists and make them available on the web as image so that spiders and robots cannot harvest the addresses easily.

The few tools that I have found in the web were commercial and work as print drivers, i.e. you choose them instead of a printer:

Imecom Print-2-Image
IMECOM does not sell single workstation licences of Print-2-Image. Their smallest licence is 25 workstation licence for about 1.595 $US. This was a k.o. criteria for me and I didn't have a closer look at it. Perhaps interesting for mid and larger companies.

FinePrint
FinePrint works nicely for me for various purposes (Print as image, printing brochures, combining several prints into one, ...). It can output TIF, BMP, EMF, and JPG in various quality levels.
For all I know there's an evaluation version of FinePrint available.

Hope this helps...

[XnTriq]

TechSmith SnagIt: Printer Capture
Printer Capture allows you to capture and manipulate the print output from any application as a digital image. This allows you to create an image file of what the printed material would have looked like if you had printed it on a printer.

Fixed a problem with Printer Capture file output when TIFF format is not specified in the Output.

[Peter2]

Hello

thank you both.

I found also

directCONVERT
http://www.directconvert.com/us/printer ... /index.htm

and
Universal Document Converter
http://www.print-driver.com/howto/conve ... o_pdf.html

but I don't know these programs.


2XnTriq:
I know and use Snagit, but in this case I need a real printer-driver (scaling, paper-size, ..) and not a screenshot-program.

Peter

[XnTriq]

Zan Image Printer – A Windows print to image (TIFF, JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG, PDF, JPEG 2000) Virtual Printer Driver
Zan Image Printer is a virtual printer driver that enables you to convert any printable document into standard BMP, TIFF, GIF, PDF, PNG, JPEG 2000 or JPEG images. The generated images can be easily shared and viewed without the native applications that created the original documents. You can simply select the Print command from your application , and then select Zan Image Printer instead of your regular (paper) printer. You then have the option to select the image format and output quality, and save the document as image file. Additional features include sending the images via Email, BMP watermarks, text annotation, text extraction, command line options, macro commands for output file naming, document name filtering, image cropping/trimming/rotating/inverting and scaling. You can also run arbitrary applications after printing has finished to easily automate batch image processing.

[Ty]

Zan image is $US 50, but has a 30-days free evaluation.

I have downloaded and played around with it a bit, it is quite impressive. Has a few odd things, but made very nice color TIFs and PNGs from a Microsoft Word document. You print to it like any other printer, then select "Properties" to make sure that you're getting all the variable that you want (file type, resolution, etc.). Seems like a pretty nice program. Of course, it would be better if it were free.

Which makes me wonder if Pierre would be interested in extending XnView to include this capability. ?? I don't know if this would be a very large job or a small one, but it would be a very cool feature.

Or perhaps Pierre should just threaten to add this capability, and Zan and the other vendors will pay him not to!!

[helmut]

Ultra Image Printer is a virtual printer driver for Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista (including terminal server). It is a file format converter that intercepts and converts any printable document into BMP, PNG, JPG, JPEG, GIF and multiple TIFF image. The generated images can be easily viewed without the applications that generated the original documents.


You can use Ultra Image Printer as a converter that intercepts and converts any printable document into standard BMP/JPEG/TIFF/PNG/GIF image in just few clicks. BMP, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and GIF are the most popular image formats. The image files can keep with the look and feel of the original document. Since the converted image has the complete information from the original file without altering characters or fonts. the viewers of the image does' t need to install the original software

[Ty Griffin]

Thanks for the Ultra Image Printer tip, Helmut.

I ended up buying Zan Image Printer a couple months ago, after my free evaluation period ran out, and I'm pretty happy with it. It has "printed" everything I've sent it to PNG, JPG, and TIFs of color and b&W and also multi-page TIFs. It feels and behaves like a pretty good product. I've had no problems, and was able to get immediate email support when I had a procedural question.

I see that Ultra Image Printer is $30, and at least from the web site doesn't appear to be a terribly polished piece of software. But of course it's hard to tell without using it.

[Troken]

Thanks for the Ultra Image Printer tip, Helmut.

I ended up buying Zan Image Printer a couple months ago, after my free evaluation period ran out, and I'm pretty happy with it. It has "printed" everything I've sent it to PNG, JPG, and TIFs of color and b&W and also multi-page TIFs. It feels and behaves like a pretty good product. I've had no problems, and was able to get immediate email support when I had a procedural question.

I see that Ultra Image Printer is $30, and at least from the web site doesn't appear to be a terribly polished piece of software. But of course it's hard to tell without using it.

Try PDFCreator, its free. You can print to TIF, PDF, JPG etc etc... I tried it out some time ago and the output is good.
http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator

PDFCreator is a free tool to create PDF files from nearly any Windows application.

Key Features:

* Create PDFs from any program that is able to print
* Security: Encrypt PDFs and protect them from being opened, printed etc.
* Send generated files via eMail
* Create more than just PDFs: PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, PCX, PS, EPS
* AutoSave files to folders and filenames based on Tags like Username, Computername, Date, Time etc.
* Merge multiple files into one PDF
* Easy Install: Just say what you want and everything is installed
* Terminal Server: PDFCreator also runs on Terminal Servers without problems
* And the best: PDFCreator is free, even for commercial use! It is Open Source and released under the Terms of the GNU General Public License.

[Peter2]

Another product:

http://peernet.com/tiff/index.html

Peter

[eL_PuSHeR]

I use FreePDFXP which is similar to FreePDF Creator and it's also free. Both use Ghostscript, and both have the same issue when creating TIFF or PNG files, where there isn't any antialias.