Blank template

We are looking at adding a blank postcard template to our Digital Storefront where users can upload a pdf as a graphic and add their own text. I need to know if there is any way I can give the user control over which fonts they can use, point size, colour etc.

If anyone has any ideas, I'm open to suggestion.

Brad,

You absolutely can give users the option of choosing the font face and color but not the point size that I am aware of. First, you need to include the fonts in the template as a formatted text resource to embed them into the pdf, also manage your colors in the template as well (although colors can be managed in the library section in the Manager once uploaded). To call out to the fonts and colors, create a formatted text field on the PrintOne display tab (located at the bottom left of the page) in the Manager and select either font color or font face and choose the field that this applies to. You will not be able to filter out the colors or fonts available, that's why you need to manage this before hand at the template level. Its all or the default defined in the template.

Also, I would like to point out that currently the only file types that can be uploaded to the store by a user is a JPG ot TIF file only, no pdf's. Hope this helps, be sure and test it extensively before publishing.

This only applies to FP Web product. Not sure the limitations in EFI's digital StoreFront.

Thanks for the quick replys guys. I'll give it a try as soon as I can.

Dan: We're using efi's Digital Storefront.

Any ideas for efi's dsf Dan?

I attended EFI's Connect '09 conference and asked this very question. EFI does not currently support the ability to allow the user to select different fonts, colors etc.

Are there any other EFI Digital Storefront users out there? Maybe we could get a forum on here specifically for us since EFI tends to do things quite differently from everyone else.

DSF is not that much different from other W2P apps that use FP Server as a composition engine. You can basically follow the suggestion given by ehazzard@printable.com - the main idea being, that the resources (fonts, colors) must be present/defined in your template. Arbitrary fonts and colors can not be added at the composition time (maybe Printable has some undocumented way to shove fonts to the composition engine at runtime, but I would not know about that). You will need to create some rules of the "tagged type" that will get font and color names and font size from "their own" fields to be used to style text entered into a different field.

I can supply some examples if needed.

HTH

Alex.

DSF is not that much different from other W2P apps that use FP Server as a composition engine. You can basically follow the suggestion given by ehazzard@printable.com - the main idea being, that the resources (fonts, colors) must be present/defined in your template.

I don't agree with this assessment. While it's true that any Web-to-Print system utilizing (the same version of) FusionPro Server is capable of composing the same output for any given input, and that you can always set up rules in FP Desktop to drive whatever logic you want based on the data, there absolutely are differences between various W2P systems in terms of what capabilities they offer to Web clients to modify the input data and the layout, and therefore the output, from within the web browser. MarcomCentral allows a wide range of customizations from within the Manager and the Store, without having to go back to the template PDF in FP Desktop. I don't know exactly what the capabilities of EFI DSF are compared to MarcomCentral, but they are certainly different.

Arbitrary fonts and colors can not be added at the composition time (maybe Printable has some undocumented way to shove fonts to the composition engine at runtime, but I would not know about that). You will need to create some rules of the "tagged type" that will get font and color names and font size from "their own" fields to be used to style text entered into a different field.

Again, I don't completely agree. As far as I know, for both MarcomCentral and DSF, you certainly need to make sure that any fonts used in the job are collected up, and both systems should limit font choices in the Web UI to those collected with the job. For colors, this is not the case; you can easily access any CMYK process color by generating a <color> tag, regardless of whether that particular color is present or named in the template. Named colors can also be added to the DIF file "on the fly" for FP Server jobs. And of course, any font size can be invoked with a simple <z newsize=xxx> tag.

mstanton, I used to, but haven't worked for EFI for the past 5 years. As for the kind of reply you received from their tech support - well, it is a good idea in general to first precisely formulate your needs and if you get a negative response, get a second (and/or third) opinion.

As you can see from the posts in this thread, the trick is to build your template right and you can often bypass the limitations a particular w2p solution is "trying" to impose on you. We often have to resort to being creative as there simply does not exist a web app anywhere that would implement exactly the kind of workflow we might prefer :-)