When to use this article
Use this article when no user on the system can successfully produce manual TIFF images from the Console, or when manual TIFFs upload but consistently fail to render. If only certain users are affected while others can print/image successfully, this is a permissions issue, not a printer issue — see Permissions required to manually print from the Console first.
Triage checklist (do this first)
- Is it only some users? → Stop. This is a permissions or account-type issue. See the permissions article above. Do not reinstall printers.
- Is the affected user an external user? → External users are intentionally blocked from manual print in the Console by design.
- Is the project's "Allow TIFF" setting enabled? → If disabled at the project level, no user can image regardless of role.
- Is it system-wide (all users, all projects)? → Proceed with the BI printer reinstall below.
Problem
Manual TIFF images appear to upload successfully and are visible in the Console, but most of the time they are not actually available for viewing or printing. This affects all users and all projects on the server.
Cause
The Black Ice (BI) virtual printer drivers used by the manual TIFF pipeline have become corrupted, partially registered, or are missing one or more printer instances. Reinstalling the BI printers restores the imaging pipeline.
Prerequisites
- Local administrator rights on the Venio application server
- A maintenance window: any in-flight manual or normal TIFF jobs will fail while printers are uninstalled
- Confirm the BI installer exists at
C:\Program Files\Venio\BI Printer Installer. If it is in a different location, substitute that path in every command below.
Resolution
Step 1 — Open an elevated Command Prompt
Right-click Command Prompt and select Run as administrator, then change to the installer directory:
cd "C:\Program Files\Venio\BI Printer Installer"Step 2 — Uninstall all existing BI printers
VenioBIInstallerConsole.exe uninstall ALL NORMAL_TIFF
VenioBIInstallerConsole.exe uninstall ALL MANUAL_TIFFStep 3 — Reinstall the printers
Install the Normal TIFF printers. Replace 4 with the number of parallel printers you want for bulk TIFF jobs. A common starting point is N − 1 where N is the number of CPU cores available to the Venio service (e.g., 4 on an 8-core box), but tune based on workload and observed CPU utilization.
VenioBIInstallerConsole.exe install 4 NORMAL_TIFFInstall the Manual TIFF printer. Only one is needed:
VenioBIInstallerConsole.exe install 1 MANUAL_TIFFStep 4 — Verify the fix
- Open Control Panel → Devices and Printers and confirm the expected number of
Venio BI Normal TIFFandVenio BI Manual TIFFprinters are listed. - Restart the Venio Distributed Service.
- Log in to the Console as a user with
ALLOW_TIFF_ON_FLYandALLOW_PRINTrights and produce a manual TIFF on a test document. - Confirm the image renders in the viewer and downloads successfully.
If the issue persists
- Check the Venio Distributed Service logs for BlackIce-related errors (the installer logic lives in
VenioBIInstaller / BlackIceInstallPrinter). - Confirm the Black Ice license has not expired on the server.
- Escalate to engineering with the server name, the output of both
installcommands, and the relevant service log excerpts.
Related articles
- Permissions required to manually print from the Console
- Project-level TIFF and OCR settings (TODO: link)
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