EDN: ESRI Developer Network
Supported with: ArcGIS Engine, ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Server
Library dependencies: System, SystemUI, Geometry, Display, Server
The Output library is used to create graphical output to devices, such as printers and plotters, and graphical file formats such as PDF and TIFF. The developer uses other objects in the ArcGIS system to generate drawing commands, and uses the Output objects to convert those commands into graphical output. Drawing instructions are typically generated by objects in the Display and Carto libraries.
Developers can extend the Output library for custom devices and export formats.
The objects that implement this functionality are grouped into a number of library subsystems. These library subsystems are:
The printer objects provide access to the ArcGIS printer engines. Each printer engine processes drawing instructions into a format that can be rendered on a print device. Several of the objects in the Printer subsystem are helper objects, designed to provide information and control for things like PostScript fonts and printer paper.
The Export objects provide access to the graphical file export drivers. These objects expose properties and methods that control resolution, bit-depth, compression options, and so on.
Note: At ArcGIS 9.0, the export objects have been completely rewritten. The version 9.0 export objects appear as a completely new set of coclasses and interfaces, with new names to differentiate them from the old objects. We encourage you to use these new objects when developing applications. The old 8.x objects are still included for backwards compatibility; however, they are slated for removal in the next release. We encourage you to update your existing applications to take advantage of the new export objects. The version of an export object can be determined by the convention used in its name: for example, PDFExporter is from 8.x, ExportPDF is the new 9.0 version. The old export objects do not appear in the OMD and have been marked as 'superseded' in the developer help.
The image export objects render drawing commands into a bitmap that can be persisted into one of five different raster image formats: BMP, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, or GIF. If the drawing commands are generated by a Map object, the IWorldFileSettings interface allows you to output the image coordinates and transform to a world file. For rasters smaller than 8 MB, the export object reads a device independent bitmap from memory, converting it to the target image format. For cases where bitmap size is larger than 8 MB, the bitmap is exported to a temporary EMF file, which is subsequently parsed and rendered to the target image format. You can override this size threshold by creating the registry key "HKCU\Software\ESRI\Output" and adding a DWORD value named "esriExportRasterBufferSizeMB".
The vector export objects translate ArcGIS native drawing commands into one of five vector graphic formats: EMF, EPS, AI, PDF, or SVG. The objects expose properties and methods that control things like font embedding, inserted image resolution and downsampling, and several format-specific items.