Posted by Jim Guerber on January 14, 2005 at 21:33:51:
WOW it has been hard work, but--
Build 346 of Comet 2005 is an important feature
release for our product.
Here is a release that covers many new aspects of printing under Comet.
Read about it here: Comet 2005 Printing Features.
We have made important changes to HTML printers and added PDF printers.
We added PDF printers for two important reasons:
1. PDF files have become the de Facto Standard for document archiving and retrieval.
2. If you print to a PDF printer, you are printing to a full-fledged windows printer.
All graphics, shapes, font changes, etc. are rendered. See for yourself; run
the demo program CFORM in our DMW directory. You will see that every windows
feature is rendered correctly.
To implement PDF printing you must have a PDF printer driver. Comet recognizes
two:
For those of you that already have Adobe Acrobat, Comet will link to an acrobat
printer driver. For the rest of us, we have implemented awareness of a pdf printer
driver provided by pdfFactory. I am using their free downloaded package for
my testing, and I have to say I prefer this driver to the one provided by Adobe.
You will find that Adobe Acrobat costs around $300 while pdfFactory costs $50.
The free download prints a footer at the bottom of each page that advertises
pdfFactory.
Either one of these drivers will render a PDF file silently in the background
if configured so. We have provided a new DES program called VIEWDOC that will
display the final document if you wish.
No more cascading printers!
That is right, windows printers, HTML printers, Text printers and pdf printers
will no longer give an error 30 if a print job is in progress and someone else
attempts to open the printer. We no longer need exception printers. In fact
one program could open the same printer on 2 different LUNS and generate 2 separate
printouts.
Document Manager
We have built a replacement for the spooler called DocMgr. It is part of the
REL release. Try it. It is windows based and coded in IB so it works on CometAnywhere
clients too.
I can't wait for you to try this release - it is super. And please, I really
appreciate your remarks either good or bad on this forum.
Start with the link below.
Oh, yes, we are giving you 100 LUNS to play with too.