Creating tifs directly from VB.Net.

Question

The current applications uses .net printdocument to create print jobs which it sends to a standard printer. We use the blackice tif print driver to capture the output and manage it from there. The problem is that some print jobs take 30 seconds to come out of the queue, and blackice will not allow you to change settings on the driver (like output filename) until the job is complete. This means the application has to wait 30 seconds until it can print the next job. Is there a better way? Can I create/print tif images directly from .Net without a 3rd party print driver? Do I risk quality to do this?

Answer 1

Well, yes, the Bitmap class can save bitmaps in the .tiff format and supports multiple frames. But you'll most likely find that now it is your program taking 30 seconds to get the job done. You'll also be battling memory problems on a 32-bit operating system, printers have a lot of resolution and the Bitmap class isn' particularly frugal with unmanaged memory usage.

Encoding a multi-frame .tiff is covered by this thread.

Answer 2

There is an open-source image handler library called FreeImage that might just do the job for you here in respects of manipulating TIFF's. There are a variety of wrappers for different languages listed on that site. The documentation and API is quite comprehensive, it could be a worthy library to check out if difficulties are encountered or need to harness more weapon and power over the TIFF file manipulation...