directPRINT/Office

Printing of office documents

directPRINT/Office provides printing and converting of Microsoft Office documents from Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Visio as well as Adobe PDF. Printing can be performed on any Windows printer, to file and remote printers and optional to raster image files as TIFF, JPEG, PCX and BMP.

For the printout the document is loaded into the original application (Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Visio or Adobe Acrobat Reader) and a printout is started without any user intervention. Printouts can be performed on any Windows installed printer. directPRINT/Office provides maximal safety against the plentifulness of Office file format versions. It achieves the highest possible printout quality, because the document is rendered by the application himself.

Scaleable solution

The directPRINT/Office solution can be scaled between simple and separated file format converter modules up to a complete customized and automated document converting server.

One-Shot File Converter: Print or convert single files on demand.
File Converting Server: Completed with some other modules (e.g. Hot Directory Service "directPRINT/Service") you can send your files to the document server and get back them in another format.
Archive with TIFF, JPEG, PCX och BMP: Together with the Tiff printer driver directCONVERT all formats can be converted to raster files as TIFF or JPEG.
Integration into the existing environments
With batch routines or with Visual Basic using the provided COM/ActiveX Interface the integration into your system is made easy.

Advantages

Converts and prints RTF, DOC, XLS, PPT and PDF. Output to TIFF, JPEG, GIF, BMP, PCX and further formats is possible.
Direct printing or redirection of the printer data to file. Closely all actual print formats are possible.
Optimal print quality.
All converters can be executed from batch level.
COM / ActiveX interface, usable in Visual Basic
Archive converter: A demo application delivered with sourcecode converts all files in a directory.
Fast development: Modify contained sourcecode examples and make your own solution faster.
Sends errormessages to the Windows Eventlog. Makes remote administration easier.
For Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows 7.
Easy installation

How does it work?

directPRINT/Office handles the original application using theire ActiveX/COM interface. It opens the corresponding Office application, loads the document, handles the print properties and starts printing. The printjob is been monitored and optionally the output of the printer driver can be redirected to the output file provided in the command line.

The Original Appliance Approach

There are two approaches converting proprietary document files as Microsoft Office documents are:

a) A direct file-to-file converter, written through back-engineering of the original file format, experienced by try and error. Due to the complexity of Office files not every aspect of the document can be handled. New features are available after years, if ever.

b) Using the original document application and theire print function.

Office applications are designed for optimal print output. All aspects of the documents are taken into account, the printed output is to be expected exactly as intended. Using a virtual printer driver intercepting the print stream will provide professional conversion quality.

The fast developlement of Office file formats is a cardinal problem for all manufactures of direct file-to-file converters. directPRINT/Office applies for a conversion the original office application. Just by updating these office applications, you get an up-to-date format converter. This concept of directPRINT/Office reduce your expenses into file format converters, makes lot's of particular problems to disappear, and provides you with the newest technology. For years.

Since Microsoft Office 97 it is prooved that the ActiveX/COM interface is a stable element of Windows. Thus we consider that file converting using this interface is the most cost efficient and compatible way. Formatting and versioning problems should be reduced to an absolute minimum.

System requirements

Together with directPRINT/Office the catenated Office-applications Microsoft Word™, Microsoft Excel™, Microsoft Visio™, och Microsoft Powerpoint™ must be installed. The Microsoft Office packages 97, 2000, XP and 2007 are tested. Due to some problems in Office Word 97, we recommend Microsoft Office XP or Microsoft Office 2007.

For the PDF format the free Acrobat Reader is used. You should use at least version 5.0, version 7.0 is recommended.

There are some more optional modules providing support of further formats (e.g. ME10, HPGL, CGM, Tiff, Jpeg, ...). These modules have own system requirements and may rely on further software.

As with all Client/Server systems, we suggest to use actual hardware. For optimal performance a processor faster than 2GHz and the fastest available harddisk system should be used. If you handle office documents only, 512MB RAM should be enough.

Compatibility and performance

Because modern Office documents can include macros and are able to execute external applications, directPRINT/Office executes the conversion for every Office document in a separate system environment. We call this technology "document containment". It provides the maximum of system integrity and prevents that contents of one document can interfere with contents of another document. The efford is a higher system load.

On a 2,4 Ghz Pentium system a standard letter containing a logo and 20 lines text per page needs about 0,3s per page plus 2s loading time per document.

If you are shure, that you do not need document containment, you can disable this feature. This decreases total conversion time to about 0,4s per standard page.

Copyright: The trademarks labled with ™ are trademarks of the maufactures named in the context.

Keywords: konverter converter office document convert unix hot directory windows NT 2000 XP print queue doc rtf word excel powerpoint ppoint xls mappe ppt präsentation presentation pdf tiff bmp gif pcx jpg jpeg ps eps hpgl