Elimination of Waste Pages by Hooking the Printer Data
Calsoft Labs’s expertise in hooking the printer data & UI skills enables the client to meet the technical and time-to-market objectives
Company
Technical Director,
GreenPrint Technologies, LLC
The client is a startup company called GreenPrint Technologies, LLC based in Portland, USA.
Challenge
The requirement of the client was to optimize the content sent to the printer and thereby save paper as well as printer ink. The functionality of saving the print content as PDF file was an added requirement, without which the core problem could not be addressed.
Solution
The client invited Calsoft Labs to come up with a detailed design to meet the requirements. Calsoft Labs’s engineering team, based on the expertise in printer driver development and UI application development skills, had to come up with the first version of the design in less than a month.
A team consisting of a Project Manager, Project Leader and a Senior Architect was assigned the task. The first design was ready in 20 days, target OS was Windows 2000 / XP. The team made the final release on both the operating systems and the solution was delivered in four months’ time.
Different technologies like Printer Driver, .NET Remoting, COM, Browser Helper Objects and Encryption/Decryption were employed to achieve the best solution.
The following modules were developed to meet the product requirements:
Hooking the printer data
A virtual printer driver was developed to convert the print data to PS file, which was then used in analyzing the content of data in each page. This PS file was then sent to the Preview application.
Logic for identifying the Waste pages
The logic library analyses the PS file and identifies the waste page, based on the user’s settings, viz.,
- Blank pages
- Pages with less than <N> pages
- Pages with Header Footer only
- Pages having more than <X%> of blank spaces
- Pages that contain only an Image
- Pages that contain at least one image
Any page that meets any of the above criteria will be marked as a waste page and left to the user’s decision to include/exclude from printing.
Preview through high quality compressed images
The preview application converts the PS file to images of Compressed PNG format (conversion done using the Artifex GhostScriptTM) and displays to the user for preview. The pages that were identified as waste are marked with Red Transparent layer.
Alpha Blending (Transparency) of images to mark the pages identified as waste.
The GDI+ API’s were employed to draw a transparent coloring on the Waste pages, Text Removed pages and Image removed pages for preview.
Reports
The report was provided for tracking the savings on ink and paper. .NET Remoting was employed to achieve tracking of the information over intranet and internet.
Creating PDF document of WebPages
BHO dll was used to save the Web pages as PDF document. Artifex GhostscriptTM was employed to convert the PS file to PDF documents.
License Key validation
As part of the strategy to protect against piracy, a registration module validated the product. Only a registered product was allowed to run on any system. TripleDES algorithm was employed to validate the license key.
Result
The team achieved the business objectives of the client and received a critical acclaim in the US media. Timely delivery of the software enabled the client to meet his business goals as well.
Benefits
Calsoft Labs’s expertise in product development, offers many advantages to the vendors.
- The Client’s idea to reality
- Time to market
- Lower cost of development
- Guaranteed support
Download or Purchase GreenPrint software from www.printgreener.com
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