Imaging Experts

Looking Under the Hood at Our Imaging Engine

Many companies today realize that the software products they buy are highly sophisticated, full-featured and mature. However they don’t often consider that many of the applications they use depend upon third-party components to provide some of those capabilities.

Today, software requirements are so demanding that no one company can develop all the technology that’s necessary to create a world-class product. To deal with this issue, the most common practice is to license specialized technology from third parties and then embed that technology into your application.

Because Snowbound specializes in imaging products and tools, and has done so for many years, we often serve as our own third-party. Our FlexSnap viewers and servlets and our SnowBatch conversion application all embed our own RasterMaster imaging Libraries. By doing so, they gain powerful capabilities - support for over 100 image and document formats, more than 140 functions and code tested by millions of users.

And because we understand our imaging Libraries better than anyone, we have the capability, if needed, to quickly modify the Libraries to better support our applications.

Today’s fast pace and competitive business climate demands that companies focus on their core competencies and technology expertise. The decision to buy versus build is becoming a more critical decision than ever before. When you buy from Snowbound you can be assured that you are receiving the highest quality imaging technology to meet your requirements.

-Simon

An Object-Oriented Approach to Copying and Reordering Pages in a Document

If you have a requirement to reorder pages within a document, or to create a new document containing pages from multiple existing documents, here’s an easy approach.

The first step is to create a class that represents each source page. I’ve called it com.snowbound.sample.PageReference. It only needs to store the name of the source document, and the page Index of the desired page.

package com.snowbound.sample;

public class PageReference
  {
      private int pageIndex;
      private String fileName;

    public PageReference (String file, int index)
      {
         pageIndex = index;
         fileName = file;
      }

    /**
       * @return Returns the fileName.
       */
      public String getFileName()
      {
         return fileName;
      }

   /**
      * @return Returns the pageIndex.
      */
      public int getPageIndex()
      {
         return pageIndex;
      }

}

The next class to create is an extension of java.util.Vector. I’ve named it com.snowbound.sample.DocumentModel, since it models the layout of the document that we are creating. This class only has one method, writeDocument, in addition to the inherited methods of Vector. It uses a RasterMaster for Java Snow.Snowbnd object to handle the image processing and output.

package com.snowbound.sample; 

import java.util.Vector;
  import Snow.Snowbnd;

public class DocumentModel extends Vector
  {
      public void writeDocument(String filePath, int imageFormat)
      {
          Snowbnd snow = new Snowbnd();
         for (int i = 0; i < size(); i++)
          {
              PageReference pageRef = (PageReference) elementAt(i);
              snow.IMG_decompress_bitmap(pageRef.getFileName(),
              pageRef.getPageIndex());
              snow.IMG_save_bitmap(filePath, imageFormat);
          }
      }
  }

Here’s a sample app that uses these two classes to create a new document made from pages of existing documents. In practice, the DocumentModel could be created using UI components and FileDialogs to define the input files, and the order of pages for the new document.

package com.snowbound.sample;

import Snow.Defines;

public class PageManipulationApp
  {

 public static void main (String args[])
  {
       DocumentModel model = new DocumentModel();
       model.addElement( new PageReference ("c:/imgs/splash.png", 0));
       model.add( new PageReference ("c:/imgs/snowbound.tif", 0));
       model.add( new PageReference ("c:/imgs/snowbound.tif", 1));
       model.add( new PageReference ("c:/imgs/photo.jpg", 0));
       model.add( new PageReference ("c:/imgs/.tif", 1));
     model.writeDocument("c:/imgs/new.tif", Defines.TIFF_LZW);
  }
  }

-Alex