Imaging News — November 2005

Contents:

• Feature Article: Viewing and Converting Black and White Documents
• Announcements: Snowbound Enables Easy Integration with ECM Systems with New API for Flexsnap
• Product Spotlight: RasterMaster Imaging Toolkits
• President's Corner: Making Long-Term Plans for Your Documents
• Tech Tip: Colors, Logging and Event Handling for Applets
• Buy in 2005, Pay in 2006. With only 10% down we'll deliver your Snowbound product now

Viewing and Converting Black and White Images

It is well accepted today that companies should keep documents in electronic form in order to facilitate distribution and archiving. When preparing electronic documents for web viewing, there are some important considerations of file size and document clarity that need to be addressed. Black and white images stored as 1-bit per pixel files, such as TIFF or Group 4, provide high compression rates and clear display. However, web browsers don’t support files stored in these popular formats.

Companies that want to view these documents or images over the Web often convert those images to the standard format for web browsers: JPEG. However, this format does not handle the sharp delineations in 1-bit per pixel information very well, creating fuzzy artifacts that may distort images that are automatically re-sized by the browser, and increases the file size because information is stored as 8-bits or 24-bits per pixel. A TIFF image representing a one page B&W document would be around 60 KB but is expanded to 300 KB as an 8-bit image or 1 MB as a 24-bit image.

Displaying black and white text and images clearly over the Web is achievable. There are simple solutions companies can implement to keep text and images looking sharp and file sizes small.

• Alias text when converting to JPEG to create smoother lines in JPEG’s 8-bit per pixel grayscale format.
• Convert to the PNG file format that can handle 1-bit per pixel images. (PNG is not supported by the oldest Web browsers.)
• Convert 1-bit images when the file is requested allowing images to be scaled during conversion to match the browser.
• Scan documents as B&W images unless the color information (if present) is important.
• Use scanners or image processing software that can detect color and convert images to B&W for storage or distribution.

Learn more about document and image conversion for the Web.

Product Spotlight

RasterMaster™, our award-winning family of imaging toolkits gives developers the ability to easily incorporate expert imaging capabilities into their product or application including: scanning, viewing, conversion, manipulation, and printing black and white or color images.

RasterMaster is used by hundreds of companies to build powerful solutions including check viewing and processing applications, patient record retrieval systems, title insurance and DCM viewers, and much more.

RasterMaster is available for multiple platforms: Java, Windows, .NET, Unix, and Macintosh. Request an evaluation today

President's Corner

There has been a lot of stir recently about the preliminary decision by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to make a move away from Microsoft Office to the Open Document format for Office Applications, also called OASIS. The Commonwealth representatives have declared that as a sovereign state, they cannot be bound to a proprietary software standard.

(Visit our blog to learn more about the debate over file formats in Massachusetts and add your comments.)

This issue is especially significant to Snowbound because in dealing with so many document and image files, we recognize our customers’ needs to ensure long term data portability while avoiding proprietary vendor formats. To some extent we came into existence because we served the needs of companies that were (and are) migrating from one document management product to another.

Some common challenges we solve for our customers include:

• Home grown document and image archiving systems that produce non-standard output.
• Vast number of stored documents in a proprietary format that makes conversion seem prohibitively expensive.
• Replacement systems that don’t provide equal capabilities and for which we are asked to provide viewing enhancements

At Snowbound, in our ten years of business, we have worked closely with our customers to successfully address the above issues. Whether you utilize our universal viewers, our high performance conversion utilities or our sophisticated imaging development tools, we can provide solutions for most imaging needs. Contact us if you have a challenge you’d like us to address.

Simon Wieczner, CEO