What's New?

NEW! Zan Image Printer 5.0.4 Released!

Zan Image Printer allows you to convert any document to a PDF or graphics format for easy archival, faxing, and sharing. A windows essential for over 6 years!

Zan Image Printer allows you to effortlessly convert any document to a PDF file for easy searching and archival, a TIFF file for easy faxing, or many different image formats including BMP, GIF, JPEG, JPEG 2000, and PNG. After conversion to a standard image, the original application is no longer needed to view the printed output. Zan Image Printer works seamlessly with any other application that allows files to be printed.

June 1, 2008 - Version 5.0.4
Added a new "Place Image File Directory (IFD) in front of image data" option (Cisco TIFF format) which allows you to fax over routers/gateways such as the Cisco 3660.

Added support for 72 x 72 dpi printing.

Added support for automatic SMTP Authentication when sending email. The Auto Authentication option will detect which authentication methods the SMTP server supports and use the most secure method available to send the Email via SMTP.

April 21, 2008 - Version 5.0.3
Adds the ability to automatically send the generated images to FTP server. This allows you to automatically deploy files to your Intranet or Internet site or to a storage device for automatic backup.

Also new is support for multiple-line text watermarks which gives you additional flexibility to protect your documents, a new printer tray selector for printer redirection, and the ability to create up to 20 custom paper sizes during the installation.

With the new dual layer PDF support, Zan Image Printer can now create a PDF in both image and searchable text layer format.

The new [%email] macro allows Zan Image Printer to search the document being printed for email addresses, extract it from the text, and then automatically send the converted document via email to the extracted address.

Finally, the new print.script command for the command line utilities has been added to allow you to automate batch printing with a script file.

August 12, 2007 - Version 5.0.2
You can use the Bates Number macro for text annotation of legal and business documents.

New "Formatted text" option for text extraction, which will try to retain the original document layout.

Added VC.NET/CLI, VB.NET, and C# code samples.

Added batch printing commands for zvprtcfg and zvprtcfg_win32 command line utilities.

Provided a new user interface for image cropping.

Miscellaneous cosmetic and documentation improvements.

February 11, 2007 - Version 5.0
Added support for 64-bit(x64) processors and Windows Vista.

Added support for GIF/JPEG 2000/PNG/PDF(image only) formats.

Added ZIP creation to package the generated files.

New Support for BMP watermarks and text annotation.

No longer needs the "Create global objects" privilege when printing to Zan Image Printer in a Terminal Server session.

Added support for sending the generated images as Email after creation.

The user interface now supports the XP theme style.

Supports more DPI resolutions.

Supports printer redirection.

Added the "Produce an image height of xxxx lines" option to create faxable TIFFs.

TIFF now supports LZW compression method.

The sentinel file name can be defined with macros; Also supports template based sentinel file generation.

The setup has been improved so that the user can configure the supported DPI resolutions, available paper sizes, and color mode during installation.

Supports an event log for troubleshooting.

New image processing operations have been added: rotate, flip, and transpose.

Now supports installing Zan Image Printer to a custom folder.

Added the Program Information dialog.

Each of the Zan Image Printers will be assigned to its own printer port.

A few more macros have been added such as user name, computer name, and file name. The folder now can also be macro defined.

New FAQ on multi-threaded printing.

New FAQ on how to configure Zan Image Printer to combine/merge multiple document types into a single TIFF or PDF file.

New FAQ on how to create faxable TIFF files.

New FAQ on how to restrict the supported DPI resolutions/paper sizes to only those that will actually be used by the printing application.

Provides access to history dropdown lists for many functions in addition to the folder and file name.

The DPI value in BMP file header is always set to 96 DPI, this has been fixed.

Some cosmetic improvements.

January 15, 2006 - Version 4.0.10
Added TIFF Class F facsimile files support, Zan Image Printer now can create fax ready files(TIFF-F) for fax boards and fax applications.

Improved the installation to support installing up to 10 black & white printers and 10 color printers during each installation.

Provided VBScript/VB/Delphi/C++ code samples showing how to automate printing of web page HTML, Word DOC and Excel XLS files programmatically.

Supports using regular expression to remove dynamic unwanted string from the document name. The image files can also be custom named based on a field value within the document by specifying a regular expression.

Added the "Color Reduction Threshold" option to remove halftone screening artifacts when printing to monochrome images. In some cases, you can improve print quality by removing halftone screening artifacts thus making images appear more natural.

October 10, 2005 - Version 4.0.9
New features supported: downsize image to specified pixel size, append form feed character (ASCII 0x0c) after every page, RLE8 compression for BMP 256/grayscale files, silent install and uninstall with the -silent command line switch, includes Delphi code samples.
Fixes an issue where the "Auto pick a unique name to prevent collision" option can only pick up to 99 unique file names.
Improves the installation to avoid the "Unable to add printer driver..." error on some rare Windows XP computers where the path environment variable does not point to the %SYSTEMROOT%\System32\Wbem folder.

May 1, 2005 - Version 4.0.8
Added several new features: opacity of status dialog, apply this option to all documents on the warning dialog, all users share the same settings option, silent and custom install of Zan Image Printer. Also fixes a buffer overrun bug when number of history folders or file names is more than 40.

October 9, 2004 - Version 4.0
Zan Image Printer 4.0 has been completely rewritten under the hood to be more powerful and robust. It supports running as an unprivileged normal user in security conscious network environments. You can setup multiple copies of Zan Image Printer that are each configured to print files to a different folder.

Since the core program now is spawned in current user's security context, 4.0 supports saving to mapped network drives or UNC paths natively without any workaround. The previous versions of Zan Image Printer run in system account.

Added the Save As dialog in addition to the Zan Image Printer dialog before printing starts.

Added the support to run one or more applications for all generated image files after printing finished . This feature enables to automate batch image processing easily.

Allows to identify and retain the original document name. The document name passed in by the printing application may contain unwanted strings(e.g. path or product name) in addition to the original document name.

Supports terminal services and fast user switching, except with the limitation that Zan Image Printer could differentiate only between different users.

Added a Cancel button on the status dialog.

Added an uninstaller.

Removed the filename mode, use macro commands to define file name instead. We believe this will allow more flexible ways to define how to generate the file name.

Removed the Current User ID option, since the core program now is spawned in current user's security context, each logged in user will automatically have his own Zan Image Printer settings.

Allows to set the output folder and file name programmatically via StartDoc Win32 API.

All Zan Image Printer specific settings are saved in text ini files. Using ini files makes it easy for users to modify the settings either manually or programmatically. INI files transport easily to other computers as well. It is also possible to configure Zan Image Printer so that all users share the same settings.

A big problem with the previous versions was the inability for each printer instance to have its own settings. Now each printer instance can has its own settings.

Added command line utilities zvprtcfg and zvprtcfg_win32 to allow controlling Zan Image Printer with easy programming.

Added the single-strip TIFF option, since some applications cannot cope with TIFF files that have more than one strip.

Now will call Win32 API to remove the invalid characters in the source document name instead of using our own algorithm and routine to remove the invalid characters.

Added the text extraction feature. If the source document contains text information, can extract and save the text from the document in a separate text file.

Added border trimming support.

Added image cropping/inverting.

New more robust memory allocation algorithm, if printing in black and white mode, Zan Image Printer can generate the image in seconds for large paper size such as A0.

August 11, 2003 - Version 3.0

August 4, 2002 - Version 2.0

February 1, 2002 - Version 1.0

Return to top

Print to image - BMP,JPEG,TIFF,GIF,PDF,PNG,JPEG 2000

What's New?