TIFF Printer Driver Overview

The Black Ice TIFF Printer Drivers are designed for developers and end users to help build fax, document imaging, e-commerce, archiving, or raster image capturing applications.

Fax, document imaging, and archiving applications cannot process documents like Word files, Excel spreadsheets or PDF files directly. In order to process these types of documents they should be converted into another format which is suitable for the application.

Black Ice TIFF Printer Drivers provide a very simple, user friendly method to convert documents into formats that can be easily processed.

The TIFF Printer Drivers from Black Ice Software work the same way as any other printer, with the difference being that Black Ice TIFF Printer Drivers are neither connected nor require a hardware printer.

Black Ice printers vs hardware printers

Any document that can be printed to a hardware printer can also be printed to a Black Ice printer. With hardware printers, the result of the printing is a paper copy of the original document, and with the Black Ice TIFF Printer Drivers the result of the printing will be a TIFF file containing an exact "image" of the printed document.

Compared to hardware printers, Black Ice TIFF Printer Drivers are much more flexible. Hardware printers support only a few predefined paper sizes and resolutions. Black Ice TIFF Printer Drivers support more than 84 predefined paper sizes, user definable paper sizes and any resolution between 50 and 3000 DPI.

Why use Black Ice TIFF printers?

The first version of the Black Ice TIFF printer driver was released in 1991 and Black Ice Software was the first company which sold printer drivers for fax and imaging applications.

Since the original release, there have been many new features and improvements added to the product, and today Black Ice printer drivers work with every Microsoft Windows operating system and support the latest in printer driver technology.

Black Ice printer driver technology

Unlike other printer driver vendors, Black Ice Software developed their printer drivers from the ground up and are not based on Microsoft Unidrivers. This decreases significantly the product's dependency on changes that Microsoft may make to their Unidriver architecture.

Black Ice TIFF printer drivers were designed to perform most of the printing in user level printer components instead of kernel level components. User level components work better in applications that allocate huge amounts of memory and they provide more flexibility than kernel level components.

The Black Ice TIFF printer drivers support printing in two different data type:  RAW and EMF 1.003.  Different print jobs require different printing methods, and by including support for both the RAW data type and the EMF data type, Black Ice TIFF printer drivers provide enhanced flexibility for handling print jobs, as well as advanced  printing options, such as sharing the Black Ice TIFF printer across a network.

In addition to their capability to convert documents into image files, Black Ice TIFF printer drivers provide very fast printing speed, a customizable user interface, full messaging interface and are easy to integrate into applications. They also come with a Printer Driver Resource Toolkit that makes developing applications with the Black Ice TIFF Printer Drivers easy and flawless.

Applications can easily retrieve and change printer settings, print out documents programmatically or through a user interface, and capture printer driver messages that provide all of the information needed to process the printed documents.

Black Ice TIFF printer drivers support every Microsoft Windows operating system from Windows 95 to Windows Server 2003. However because the printer driver architecture is different on many of these operating systems, Black Ice TIFF printer drivers can be grouped into the following main categories:

1. Printer drivers for Windows 95, 98 and ME
2. Printer drivers for Windows NT, 2000 and XP
3. Printer drivers for Windows NT, 2000 Terminal Servers, Citrix Terminal Servers and Windows Server 2003

Selecting the best printer driver for a given application

What is the target operating system?
If the application is designed to run on only one operating system then a printer driver for the given OS should be selected. Things are a little bit more complicated when multiple operating system types should be supported. In this case more than one printer driver should be purchased.

When the application must work on Windows NT/2000/XP non terminal servers then a NT/2000/XP printer driver is needed. If the application supports both the terminal server version and the non terminal server version of the NT/2000 operating systems and also works with Citrix Server and Windows 2003 servers, then a terminal server printer driver is also needed.  A terminal server printer driver is necessary when users will be remotely accessing the terminal server, such as through a terminal server client.

In addition, when the application supports any of the Windows 9X operating systems then a Windows 9x printer driver is also required.

Licensing a printer driver

Every Black Ice printer driver is Royalty FREE! To license one or more printer drivers from Black Ice Software, a License Agreement should be signed. The License Agreement contains the name of the company who licenses the printer driver and the name of the product that the printer driver will be part of.

For pricing and to download License Agreements click here.