Message Capture Sample
Version number:

Buy Now Download

The Black Ice Printer Drivers include a messaging interface for real time communication with a third party application. The messaging is synchronous and can be processed by a third party application. Developers can control or monitor the printing process through the messaging interface. The print job can be configured just before printing starts, such as output file name, output directory or file format. Also, the printing process can be monitored page by page and action can be taken if the print job is finished or aborted.

The Printer Drivers can also pass the output document in PDF, TIFF, BMP or EMF format, the text output and the OCR output in memory using the messaging interface. This can be useful for HIPAA Compliant applications.

The printer driver will send messages when the following events happen during the printing process:

	Printer Name	Job ID	Document Name	Group File Name	Image File Name	Page Number	DEVMODE structure	OCR Data	OCR Data Type	Text Data	Image or PDF Data	Size
Change Devmode
Start of Document
Start of Page
Text Output passed in Memory
OCR Data passed in Memory
Image passed in Memory
End of Page
End of Document
Print Job Aborted

The API/Resource Toolkit includes Memory Capture sample applications written in C++, C#, VB.NET to demonstrate how to use the Messaging Interface of the Printer driver.
To help C#, Visual Basic or other developers, the Resource Toolkit includes the BiPrnDrv.OCX that makes the process of capturing printer driver messages easy. The OCX will capture every printer driver message internally and will fire an OCX event for every message.

Using the Start Application feature of the Black Ice printer drivers along with the messaging interface provides a straightforward method of monitoring the printing process. Source code for the Message Capture Sample is available in C#, VB.NET, and C++.

Back to Sample Comparison Chart page