Image Viewer CP Pro ActiveX Control

What's new in this version: Version 9.4 added digital signed for ocx and executable of installer files and vb.net 2010 and c# 2010 samples, fixed samples cannot run on 64 bit OS issue.

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• 2.0 stars

  "barebones functionality with some quirks"

  September 22, 2009  |   By FringeElement

  Version: Image Viewer CP Pro ActiveX Control 6.0

  Pros

  The product substantially worked as advertised. The ActiveX control had reasonably good integration with Visual Studio and provided basic image manipulation functions.

  Cons

  * bugs and missing functionality required awkward workarounds
  * poor documentation
  * technical support often unresponsive

  Summary

  The ActiveX control is limited. It does many things very well but is missing some features and has some bugs.
  
  The API lacks an overall uniform design. Some functionality is redundantly covered by more than one API function and it is not clear which is the preferred one to use. Some API functions use zero-based indexing and some use one-based. This information is not included in the documentation. The documentation is barebones and you have to figure out some aspects of how the API functions work through trial and error.
  
  The product has bugs some of which can be handled with workarounds and some cannot. For example, there is a bug where exported PDFs have their image colors inverted. The workaround involves using an alternate method of loading and saving the image but for large files this can be a performance hit.
  
  Here is an example of the type of awkward workaround you need to implement to accommodate missing functionality. The ActiveX control supports multi-page TIFF files. You can load such a file and display the image of a particular page. The control has various commands for manipulating an image. The ones I am interested involve rotating pages. You would expect that there would be a simple means of saving changes made to a page (you can do so fairly easily with single-page files). With a multi-page file, you need to export the changed page as a separate file and then issue commands to delete the original page from the multi-page file, insert the new page, save the changed multi-page file and then reload the updated file into the control. Unfortunately, the API function for exporting a single page as TIF has a bug where changes to the image are discarded so the above steps are further complicated by the need to export the image of the changed page to ".BMP" format and then convert to TIFF before importing. Once you have written a routine to take care of all of this, it works but one shouldn't have to go through such a hassle.
  
  Technical support is a problem. It appears that there is one tech. support guy. When he responds he usually gives useful information. The trouble is that mail messages sent to the tech support address (there is no phone support) often get no response.
  
  It is not enough to look at the list of supported features to see if everything is there that you want. My recommendation is to work with the demo version of the control (it is the same as the licensed version except for a nag screen) and write simple proof-of-concept test code and verify that the control can actually do everything that you need before you buy.
  
  The OCR add-on module for the product appears to be a packaging of the free tesseract OCR engine. If you don't mind the performance hit of saving the part of the image to be processed to an intermediate file you can implement the same OCR functionality using the free Tessnet2 library as described here:
  http://www.pixel-technology.com/freeware/tessnet2/.
  
  For $110 for a single developer license you would have to expect there to be some shortcomings when compared with competing products that cost a whole lot more. I was able to develop a slick document manipulation, storage and retrieval UI in WinForms using this control. If you are short on cash and don't mind putting in some extra dev. time, this product might work for you. If you have plenty of money and your time is valuable, you will probably want to go with a different product.

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