This section describes how to print images using RasterMaster. The features includes altering the size of an image and image printing.

RasterMaster prints to any device with a valid Windows printer driver installed.

If a color or gray scale image is printed to a 1-bit or bi-level printer such as an HP Laser Jet type printer, the image is dithered or reduced to 1-bit per pixel automatically.

The capabilities of the printer are detected by the RasterMaster libraries to determine if the image must be dithered. The technique employed is Stucky error diffusion. This technique simulates grayscale by the placement of dots. The higher the resolution of the printer, the better the effect.

For examples on how to use the various printing methods included in the RasterMaster SDK, please see The Print sample and The SilentPrint sample. For the full method reference, please see the RasterMaster Java API documentation.

Printing Large Documents

Printing large documents, such as documents approaching or exceeding 100 pages, or documents set to a resolution of 300 DPI or above, requires additional memory resources. These additional resource requirements can affect the performance of both servers and clients.

Servers

Depending on the current Java Virtual Machine memory configuration for the Imaging server, the need for additional resources may cause an out of memory error. Increasing the Java Virtual Machine maximum heap size to the Imaging server during start up can help avoid memory errors. Specify the minimum and maximum heap size by passing the parameter -Xms and -Xmx to the Imaging server during start up, where the amount of memory is in megabytes or gigabytes you want to allocate to the Imaging server.

Clients

Each of the different browsers handles the increased resource demands uniquely. In some cases, when printing documents that require additional resources, the document may print with blank pages, fail to respond, or require the browser or computer to be restarted.

Solution

A workaround for this problem may be to download the document locally and then print it. If the document does not have any annotations or the document is to be printed without annotations, the original document can be downloaded and printed. However, if a document is to be printed with annotations, a TIFF version of the document can be downloaded and printed.