🚀 go-pugleaf

Happy with ImageEn myself.

regards,
Scott.

> What I've found so far include:
>
> HiComponents

"Gerhard Wessels" <gerhardwessels@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:4897fc74@newsgroups.borland.com...
> We're currently using Gustavo Daud's Delphi Twain together with LibTiff 
> but we're having difficulties with this solution. It works but it is not 
> great.

What does 'having difficulties' mean?  Delphi Twain has always worked 
perfectly for me.  Are you having trouble making the tiff?  There's a number 
of ways of doing that, with GDI+ being a very good choice.

GrandmasterB wrote:
> "Gerhard Wessels" <gerhardwessels@gmail.com> wrote in message 
> news:4897fc74@newsgroups.borland.com...
>> We're currently using Gustavo Daud's Delphi Twain together with LibTiff 
>> but we're having difficulties with this solution. It works but it is not 
>> great.
> 
> What does 'having difficulties' mean?  Delphi Twain has always worked 
> perfectly for me.  Are you having trouble making the tiff?  There's a number 
> of ways of doing that, with GDI+ being a very good choice.
> 
> 
> 
Difficulties relate to speed.

The application runs on a 500MHz, 512MB ram machine. The application 
needs to scan images from a multi functional device or scanner, convert 
it into the correct multi page tiff format and send it to Microsoft Fax 
for faxing.

The issue is getting it into the correct format quickly. By "correct" 
format I mean a format that doesn't require MS Fax to process it further 
- which is what happens when the file is not exactly correct.

You may have inferred from my original post that we're trying to get rid 
of Delphi Twain and/or LibTiff. This is not necessarily the case. I have 
inherited this project so I am trying to tap into the "Collective" to 
get to the most efficient way of creating the tiff. If what we have is 
the best way then fair enough, but if there is a better (read faster) 
way then we would go for that.

So, yes, we're having difficulty in creating a multi page tiff in the 
exact format MS Fax expects.

Here is what we've found regarding the MS Fax format:



Fax Image Format
The fax service creates fax documents as Tagged Image File Format Class 
F (TIFF Class F) (for facsimile) files based on the Tagged Image File 
Format (TIFF) 6.0 specification.
In addition to the requirements of the TIFF 6.0 specification, the fax 
service has the following requirements for TIFF Class F files:
�	TIFF files must have the Modified Modified READ (MMR) two-dimensional 
encoding data compression format. This format is defined by CCITT (The 
International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee) Group 4.
�	The byte-ordering format of TIFF files must match the byte-ordering 
format of the CPU processing the file. For example, if a little-endian 
CPU is receiving the TIFF file, the file must be in little-endian format.
�	The TIFF field (tag) RowsPerStrip must contain a value of 1. This is 
because the fax service does not support transmission of data image 
strips. The RowsPerStrip describes the number of scan lines per image 
strip in the facsimile image.



I know that asking a 500MHz machine to do this kind of processing very 
quickly is possibly asking for too much, but I need to know that we're 
doing everything as efficiently as possible. If it still too slow, well 
then it can't be done and we'd have to find faster machines...

Also, we're severely understaffed so I cannot spend months on this. I 
would greatly appreciate any help/suggestions/code samples etc.

I apologize for the long post but I wanted to explain the situation clearly.

Best regards,

Gerhard

> I know that asking a 500MHz machine to do this kind of processing very 
> quickly is possibly asking for too much, but I need to know that we're 
> doing everything as efficiently as possible. If it still too slow, well 
> then it can't be done and we'd have to find faster machines...
> 
> Also, we're severely understaffed so I cannot spend months on this. I 
> would greatly appreciate any help/suggestions/code samples etc.
> 
> I apologize for the long post but I wanted to explain the situation 
> clearly.

I _think_ this TIFF functionality is easily implemented with
GDI+, but I don't know if that is faster than your current
implementation, though.

Also I wonder if it's not cheaper to buy a faster (2nd hand?)
PC. (Or switch to Linux...)

"Gerhard Wessels" <gerhardwessels@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:48993d19@newsgroups.borland.com...
> The issue is getting it into the correct format quickly. By "correct" 
> format I mean a format that doesn't require MS Fax to process it further

Ok.  Then it sounds like you have even more options then, as you dont need 
both a scanning and image toolkit, and you dont have to screw around with 
modifying and testing the scanning.

I usually use GDI+ for image encoding, as its worked well in creating files 
that are 'widely' accepted..  It may be something you'd want to look at for 
no other reason than its what windows/IE use to encode files.  So it may be 
able to make tiff files that windows fax likes.

A 500mhz should be able to handle the job, though as Herre suggested, 
hardware is cheap nowadays and the fastest, cheapest solution to speeding 
things up might be to install this on something at least > 2 ghz.. Would it 
be feasable to put another 512 meg ram in there?  That might speed things up 
greatly if the problem is that its running low on operating ram and causing 
things to swap back and forth to disk as it manipulates images.  Assuming 
the machine can see that much ram :-)

> I apologize for the long post but I wanted to explain the situation 
> clearly.

No, thats exactly the best way to describe a problem.  If you just ask for 
toolkits, you'll get a dozen different recommendations, but they may not 
help with your specific problem.

GrandmasterB wrote:
> "Gerhard Wessels" <gerhardwessels@gmail.com> wrote in message 
> news:48993d19@newsgroups.borland.com...
>> The issue is getting it into the correct format quickly. By "correct" 
>> format I mean a format that doesn't require MS Fax to process it further
> 
> Ok.  Then it sounds like you have even more options then, as you dont need 
> both a scanning and image toolkit, and you dont have to screw around with 
> modifying and testing the scanning.
> 
> I usually use GDI+ for image encoding, as its worked well in creating files 
> that are 'widely' accepted..  It may be something you'd want to look at for 
> no other reason than its what windows/IE use to encode files.  So it may be 
> able to make tiff files that windows fax likes.
> 
> A 500mhz should be able to handle the job, though as Herre suggested, 
> hardware is cheap nowadays and the fastest, cheapest solution to speeding 
> things up might be to install this on something at least > 2 ghz.. Would it 
> be feasable to put another 512 meg ram in there?  That might speed things up 
> greatly if the problem is that its running low on operating ram and causing 
> things to swap back and forth to disk as it manipulates images.  Assuming 
> the machine can see that much ram :-)
> 
>> I apologize for the long post but I wanted to explain the situation 
>> clearly.
> 
> No, thats exactly the best way to describe a problem.  If you just ask for 
> toolkits, you'll get a dozen different recommendations, but they may not 
> help with your specific problem.
> 
> 
> 
Thank you for your suggestions.

We are looking into using beefier machines for this application. I've 
neglected to mention (again!) that this is not a once off 
problem/solution. We're a big(ish) company that sells MFD's and with it 
a "controller" that extends the functionality of the MFD. Changing the 
hardware is therefore not as easy as it sounds. The whole supply chain 
needs to change. But we are busy with a process...

I've read somewhere that GDI+ does not support 1 bit graphics - which is 
what fax requires. Is this correct?

Anyways, we're looking into using Microsoft's fax printer at the moment. 
We get a DC to print to and from there Microsoft handles the whole job. 
Hopefully it is fast enough. If it is, it solves our image conversion 
problem!

I'll know soon...

Regards,
Gerhard

> We are looking into using beefier machines for this application. I've 
> neglected to mention (again!) that this is not a once off 
> problem/solution. We're a big(ish) company that sells MFD's and with it 
> a "controller" that extends the functionality of the MFD. Changing the 
> hardware is therefore not as easy as it sounds. The whole supply chain 
> needs to change. But we are busy with a process...
> 
> I've read somewhere that GDI+ does not support 1 bit graphics - which is 
> what fax requires. Is this correct?

When working with bitmaps (which in GDI+ just means any raster type
image; TIFF, JPG, PNG, BMP etc.) you can specify PixelFormat1bppIndexed
as pixel format in the constructor.

> Anyways, we're looking into using Microsoft's fax printer at the moment. 
> We get a DC to print to and from there Microsoft handles the whole job. 
> Hopefully it is fast enough. If it is, it solves our image conversion 
> problem!

That should work as well.

Do you prepare your images in the fax resolution (200dpi or actually
204x196dpi (Fine) or 204x98dpi (Standard))? Also faxing tends to be
slower when there are many 'switches' between black and white pixels,
because it is run-length encoded. Scanned images often have many
'extra pixels' in the white areas. [You probably already know/discovered
this, but I thought to just mention it.]

Good luck,
    Herre