What are the pros and cons of various strategies for mananaging an images some of which may be the result of FRX-to-TIFF or PDF and some of which may be acquired from a scanner.

I have learned how to install the Kodak/Wang image control from a Windows 2000 CD and that seems to have pretty good ability to acquire, manipulate, and display the images on a VFP form. Would there be any risk is using this given possible incompatibilities with future Windows versions?

What would be the other image viewers that can be put on a VFP form.

Is the simple image base class a possibility? What image types does it support?

Then the question is storing and printing. If we have the pdf files stored in the file system is there any performance penalty in loading the pdf reader when moving to each new file. Can a PDF be printed under program control from the VFP program or does the user have to manually click the PDF print option.

Are there dangers in storing PDFs or TIFFs in a VFP table. Memo, General, Blob. Just use filetostr and strtofile to bring the files into and out of the record? Any penalty there? What risk of corruption? What benefits to using a table instead of the file system?

Basically would like to have the ability to view thumbnails or treeview of documents for each individual and then quickly see them and possibly print them.

If I use VFP 9 output to TIFF, I can see great benefits but I don't think that it can give me a unified way to view and print any image.

TIA

Bill