Miraplacid Text Driver SDK 2011: About

What is Miraplacid Text Driver

Miraplacid Text Driver is software to extract text from printable documents. Miraplacid installer adds a new printer to the system. Printer name is "Miraplacid Text Driver". When you print to this "printer", Miraplacid Text Driver dialog pops up. You can preview the extracted text, apply some formatting options and encoding (ANSI or Unicode). Then you can save it to text file, print to a real printer or upload to a server. Orignial document could be redirected to a real printer.

Miraplacid Text Driver consists of the following components:

Installer – to install the Miraplacid Text Driver components
Miraplacid Text Driver Core – to process the image. Core includes text rendering plug-ins (like formatted text, plain text and so on) and Transport plug-ins (like save-to-file, upload-to-FTP-server, etc)
Printer Driver – to transfer image Windows printing system and Miraplacid image processing Core
User Interface (UI) – to let user tell Core what to do

Learn more about Miraplacid Text Driver.

What is Miraplacid Text Driver Software Development Kit (SDK)

Miraplacid Text Driver SDK includes

setup making wizard setupmaker.exe. Start it, set all the parameters, push "Ok" buttons and get your custom Text Driver installation component mtd.dll. This dll has everything to install Miraplacid Text Driver to new PC. Those parameters include printer driver name and all the other names. You can change it to your company name or your product name (see license agreement for detail).
Miraplacid Text Driver documentation
SDK documentation
Custom installer, sample registration utility and custom User Interface.

Miraplacid Text Driver SDK works only on Windows 2000/XP/2003/XP 64-bit/2008/Vista/Windows 7 and contain driver for these platforms only.
That means, custom driver built with SDK setupmaker will only work on Windows 2000/XP/2003/XP 64-bit/2008/Vista/Windows 7.

Do you need SDK or regular Miraplacid Text Driver is what you need?

Miraplacid Text Driver saves all the settings to system registry as a set of profiles. It means, that you can set it once and use it over and over. If you never change settings, just turn auto-save mode on and Miraplacid Text Driver will not bug you with UI dialog. You can add something like {{DATE}}, {{JOB}} and {{PAGE}} to path or filename, and all the result images will be saved separately.

If it works for you, you probably do not need the SDK.

All the Miraplacid Text Driver controls you can see on Miraplacid Text Driver UI dialog, also available through COM interface. In fact, UI communicates with Core through COM. It means, that you can write a script or application to manage printing process.

If this is what you need, you still can do it without using SDK.

There are the folowing cases when you need the SDK:

When you integrate Miraplacid Text Driver with your product and want everything to be installed by your installer. Meaning, you do not want Miraplacid Text Driver installation dialogs to pop up.
When you need custom User Interface which will be compatible with your product by functionality.
When you need to have much more control over printing process. In this case, you will need to write your own User Interface, which could not contain any actual graphics elements. This UI may just control printing process.
When you need to have a automation component for document-to-text convertion purposes which will be named and look like integral part of your own product (re-branding).

How to start working with SDK

With Miraplacid Text Driver SDK you will prepare printer driver installation package and install the driver on your PC.
If you skip these steps and launch some sample application, you will probably get an error mesage, cause some SDK components require proper registration and installation.

Launch setupmaker.exe. Default settings work fine. Press Ok button.
Copy mtd.dll generated by setupmaker.exe to examples.vb\setupui or examples.net\MTD_SE_Setup folder.
Launch Setup.exe and press Install button.

Now you can start over and change settings or play with other SDK modules.

So what did we just do?
setupmaker.exe is a printer driver installation Wizard. It created printer driver installer dll (mtd.dll).
examples.vb\setupui\Setup.exe is a live example of custom Text Driver setup utility. It loads mtd.dll from the current folder (that is why we have to copy it first) and calls installation handler. mtd.dll installs virtual printer driver to the system.

Custom Installer

mtd.dll does not include dialogs. You can implement your own UI if you need one. There is pretty straightforward setup sample UI on VB6 in folder examples.vb\setupui\

If you integrate Miraplacid Text Driver into your software, you will probably prefer to use single UI for all your components and call Miraplacid Installation and Uninstallation functions form there.

There are two ways how you can integrate the installer with your system:

through DLL function calls
through COM interface

COM interface will give you error details and progress information.

See sample setup UI in folders \examples.vb\setupui and \examples.vb\MTD_SE_Setup

These interfaces are described here

Custom User Interface

Your UI does not have to look like Miraplacid Text Driver UI. You might want to manage Miraplacid Text Driver core form your software rather than write a stand-alone UI executable. Just create an instance of object MTD with events (if you write on VB – or implement COM events sink if you write on C++/C#), call MTD methods, change properties and handle events.

See sample UI in folders \examples.vb\customui and \examples.net\MTD_SE_UI

You will find more information on MP Core programming here

Software Registration

When you install Miraplacid Text Driver, it shows "Trial Period" dialog with "Register" and "Continue" buttons. You can register it or continue using for 15 days. After 15 days "Continue" button disappear and you have to register or stop using Miraplacid Text Driver.

If you integrate Miraplacid Text Driver into your software and do not want your customers to register Miraplacid Text Driver manually, you can do it through COM interface.

You will find the interface description here

See registration example in folders \examples.vb\register and \examples.net\MTD_SE_Reg

If you integrate Miraplacid Text Driver into your software, you really have three options:

if Miraplacid Text Driver is an optional software in your system, you can let your customers to register it themselves if they need it.
You can purchase Miraplacid Text Driver license for your customer and register Miraplacid Text Driver via COM interface
You can purchase Miraplacid Text Driver SDK with Unlimited license. In this case you do not need to bother about registration. It could make a perfect sense if you plan to install your product based on Miraplacid Text Driver technology on more that one hundred PCs. Please contact us: sales@miraplacid.com

See Miraplacid Text Driver SDK licensing agreement for details

Software Licensing

You will need Miraplacid Text Driver software license for yourself when SDK trial period expired. You will also need software licenses for your customers. Miraplacid Text Driver licenses can be purchased from Miraplacid web site.

We strongly recommend you to sign up a reseller to purchase licenses. As soon as you purchase 5 first licenses, you will get big discount on all following licenses.

Here is how Miraplacid reseller program works:

You register as a reseller
Login to password protected area and purchase licenses. Unlike regular license purchase, you are not getting keycode instantly. Instead, you can go to keycode generation page and
Generate as many keycodes as you need (sorry, you cannot generate more keycodes than you purchased). You have to provide customer First Name and Last Name to generate a keycode.
You register customer's copy of the software (see Software Registration for details). Miraplacid software registration requires customer First Name, Last Name and Keycode. All fields are case sensetive.

If buying and installing licenses is too complicated in your case, consider purchasing Unlimited version of Miraplacid Text Driver SDK.
Please contact us: sales@miraplacid.com

About Miraplacid Text Driver SDK