Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage-u

2011.104    11/17/10    

Priority: Med    

v2011.104 includes the following:

• Major raw update supports many new camera models:
  
          Canon
               Powershot G12
               PowerShot SX120 IS
  
          Hasselblad
               H4D
  
          Nikon
               D3100
               D7000
               Coolpix P7000
  
          Nokia
               X2
  
          Olympus
               E5
  
          Panasonic
               FZ40
               FZ100
               LX5
  
          Pentax
               K-r
               K-5
               645D
  
          Samsung
               GX20
               WB2000
  
          Sony
               SLT-A33
               SLT-A55V
  
• Roll paper trimming function: New option allows users to resize the page so that it is no longer than necessary, removing white space at the bottom of the page to save roll paper.  Simply start with a long paper length and when you have finished setting up the job, right click on the preview page and select "Remove White Space at Bottom of Page".  The page will be resized so that it is only as long as needed for the current job.
• Bug fix: Fixed a bug that was causing a "file in use" error message and subsequent lockup during some file saving/conversion operations on Windows 7 systems.
• UI improvements: Minor UI tweaks.

Mike

Nice touch on the "roll paper trim function" Mike!
I've been doing  paper saving sizing  manually in the user defined driver setting.

Thanks!
David

Mike, nice addition,  was one of the most urgent requests of wide format users.

I think you didn't expect it to work with the HP drivers and I can report that is more or less correct.
The normal PCL drivers for the HP Designjet Z3200 + Z3100 + Officejet Pro K5400 do not change the sizes in the drivers settings. With the Z3100 and the K5400 if the image print size is small enough it will reduce the page print size to "letter" in the preview and that's it.

With the PostScript3 PS3 driver for the Z3200 it works, the driver defaults to "letter" again but uses the right size in printing and wastes little paper. Works most of the time it seems, sometimes it defaults to a standard paper size in the driver and some paper is wasted. The Postscript driver is a bit different on print page sizes it presents to the applications.

Bernard called and he said that it works both with his Canon iPF9000 and the Epson 11880, he did notice image size changes with the Canon driver though, not with the Epson.
BTW, Bernard asks whether on the recall search function "next"can be added so he doesn't have to scroll through years of print runs and still focus on the green selections. I have to agree.

Another observation, rare bug I guess: With the system started, Qimage Ultimate 104 then installed and the printers not hooked up all the way but the drivers functioning. On Vista 64 I see that something gets corrupted when I try the new feature (dry trial). Qimage will not start up after that. ASPI 64<>32bit spooler fault and taken out is what I recall of the messages. Repeating it by a system restart and the printer network cable disconnected, before and after, didn't recreate the conditions I  guess so it is an odd bug.  With HP drivers so I do not know whether that is a more general flaw.

Will mention the new feature on my Wide_Format_Inkjet list as it will be appreciated there.


met vriendelijke groeten, Ernst Dinkla

Try: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wide_Inkjet_Printers/

Thanks for the feedback Ernst.  Those are the sort of details I need.  Turns out page trimming isn't as trivial as it sounds and is the reason you haven't seen it until now in Qimage.  It's easy enough to change the page size outside the driver but as I've found in the past, different drivers "react" differently when that change is made.  Epsons seem to work flawlessly with the feature but I've found a (minor) idiosyncrasy here and there with some other brands/models.  For example, when the page size is trimmed, you must switch the driver to "custom" paper size.  Just doing that changes the margins in some Canon drivers.  Odd as it sounds, if you pick 8.5 x 11 letter for the Canon Pro 9000, you get a printable area of 8.0 x 10.685.  Simply change the paper size to "Custom" and enter the same 8.5 x 11 size and you get 8.231 x 10.685 as the printable area.  why it adds .231 inches to the width just by changing to "Custom" size, I don't know.  Might be a bug or might be a "feature". 

In any case, thanks for reporting.  It's good to have others reporting on what they see.

Regards,
Mike