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High Performance API for Displaying and Printing

    PixTools/View DataSheet.pdf

With the growing popularity of production and personal scanners, users are integrating paper-based information into their applications more than ever before. And, with the proliferation of Intranet/Internet and fax communications, businesses need to be able to view information at their desktops in real time. Since most business information is still on paper, users are seeking new ways to scan and view scanned documents both easily and efficiently.

PixTools/View is a full featured API that provides all the necessary image viewing and printing functions-including image display, rotation, scale, scale-to-gray and annotation. It handles image file i/o, along with memory management functions to optimize performance. The programming interface offers maximum flexibility and has been successfully integrated into hundreds of applications.

Demonstration applications are available to evaluate this exciting technology in Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT.

The toolkit can be used alone, or in conjunction with other PixTools products such as PixTools/Scan and/or PixTools/IP. This provides you, the developer with a complete development environment to meet your document imaging application needs!

Fast

PixTools/View uses in-memory storage of compressed images, combined with superior decompression libraries. That means fast image display and minimal memory usage. It optimizes operations like image rotation and annotation updates. Ask us for a demonstration CD and see for yourself!

Image Annotation

• Multi-colored highlighting
• Freehand line drawing
• Polyline drawing
• Redaction (opaque overlays)
• "Sticky notes"
• Arrow objects
• Stamp tool - can choose a BMP file and "endorse" the image with it
• Box tool - draw a rectangular outlined box object
• Ellipse tool – draw an elliptical or circular outlined object
• Read/write Wang format annotations
• Text tool that supports special characters (>ASCII 127)

HTTP/FTP File Support

PixTools/View is Web ready! View image files on the Internet just like viewing them on your local disk drive. By incorporating PixTools/View into intranets and extranets, scanned images can be viewed like any other file data type.

Color and Grayscale Support

PixTools/View supports 24-bit color images, gray-scale and black and white (binary) images. The color support includes palette conversion and dithering to display full 24-bit images on 8-bit displays and/or conversion to gray or binary data.

Broad Capabilities

• Image compression and decompression: CCITT Group 3 and Group 4, Sequential and Progressive JPEG, JBIG, PCX, PDF, and more
• Image file handling: TIFF, BMP, CALS, JPEG, PCX/DCX, JBIG, GIF, PDA, PNG, CAL
• Arbitrary rational number scale factors, separate for X and Y
• Arbitrary rectangle clipping for fast scroll and repaint
• Scaling with variable black or white biasing for readability
• True scale-to-gray (anti-aliasing) with brightness and contrast control
• Image rotation
• Multipage file reading and writing for TIFF, DCX and PDF.
• Image file conversion
• Optional Windows GUI elements including the Pan Window and page settings dialog

Image Caching and Prefetching

Under Windows, page images are automatically cached and pre-fetched in the background. That maximizes performance, while minimizing memory requirements. By using document-oriented commands, the programmer can specify the file(s) composing the document. Each file may contain one or more images. The images are accessed on a page number basis, regardless of the file name or record designator of the image source.

Interface Overview

PixTools/View is a library (DLL under Windows 98, 2000, Me and Windows NT) that typically uses 100-200 kB per binary page for storage. The API uses two primary data structures:

The API allows the user to create and load a Page with compressed or uncompressed image data, then a "get rectangle" call is made with a Settings is appropriate for the display or print operation.

Function Summary

Page functions:

PageNew Create a new page storage structure
PageGet Get an attribute value from a page storage structure
PageSet Set attribute values in a page storage structure
PageStore Transfer a buffer of image data (compressed or uncompressed) into a page storage structure
PageEnd All data has been transferred
PageFree Destroy page storage structure and free all related resources

Settings functions:

SettingsNew Create a new settings structure
SettingsGet Get an attribute value from a settings structure
SettingsSet Set an attribute value in a settings structure
SettingsCopy Create a copy of a settings structure
SettingsFree Destroy a settings structure and free all related resources

Attributes include X and Y offset, width, height, X and Y scale factor, rotation, brightness/contrast

Display functions:


RectGet Using a Page structure and a Settings structure, retrieve the selected scaled and rotated image rectangle into the supplied buffer (platform independent)

RectPaint Using a Page structure, a Settings structure, and a Window handle, paint the selected scaled and rotated image rectangle into the Window (platform dependent)

Data types accepted by the library include:

• uncompressed byte-aligned
• uncompressed word-aligned
• uncompressed double-word-aligned
• modified Group 3
• BMP run length encoding (Windows)
• PDF
• CCITT Group 3 1-D

In addition, the images can be in single or multiple strips, one or more files, and in any bit order. Used with PixTools/Scan, the library provides scan-and-rotate functionality for 11" wide scanners. By scanning in "landscape" mode and rotating on-the-fly, performance can be increased by 20%. The View rotation capability allows handling over 200 pages per minute on fast computers.

• CCITT Group 3 2-D
• CCITT Group 4
• PCX compressed
• JPEG (Windows), Progressive JPEG
• Packbits compressed
• JBIG (bitonal and gray scale)