Dan Korn

MarcomCentral® is proud to announce version 13.1 of the FusionPro® VDP Suite! This release is a follow-up to our FusionPro VDP 11 launch, which introduced some major new functionality, as well as a new subscription pricing model. The FusionPro® VDP product suite includes both Mac and Windows releases of FusionPro VDP Creator, as well as the Windows-based FusionPro VDP Producer and FusionPro VDP Server. With the new subscription model for FusionPro 11, FusionPro VDP Creator will now include FusionPro Expression for no extra charge. New features and improvements include: Support Adobe InDesign 2024 (Version 19) on both Mac and Windows Converted barcode rules to generate graphics which can be resized with great precision. Added support for ink spread on most 1-demensional barcodes to support printing on porous substrates. Added ability to insert graphics rules inline in text frames. Modified FP Imposer GUI to show more of the side menu at a time and reduce the amount of scrolling needed. Added support for auto updating of rules and other components so that fixes can be distributed without a full install. Added support to accessibility, where PDF files that have accessibility features are properly imported into a PDF output stream, retaining their accessibility tree structure. Added support to begin a new FusionPro template within FP GUI. Create a new blank PDF to build a template on inside FusionPro. Added option to delete a page from a PDF background using FusionPro GUI. FP Designer record to compose is synchronized to the record being previewed. Record being previewed is synchronized to the record being viewed in the Building Blocks dialog in the rule editor. Added feature to log the location of every graphic found, indicating the folder where the graphic was found. FusionPro v13.1.2 has the following fixes: Fixed occasional crash on Macintosh when accessing job log via FP Producer Monitor Fixed error of not being able to insert registered trademark and other symbols in Drag and Drop rule editor. Fixed issue where the background of an imposed sheet is sometimes cut off. Fixed issue in FP Imposer where the removal of bleed between rows or columns is incorrect on stacked imposition. (Case FP-407) Fixed issue in FP Imposer GUI where double-clicking on a file does not fully populate the properties in the FP Imposer GUI. Improved handling of fonts with errors so they correctly load. Resolved speed issue with large number of fields (over 300) on Windows. Improved error messages when attempting to register software with a serial number that has already been used the maximum number of times. Resolved case where setting to “treat field values as tagged” was ignored for Secondary Data Sources (case FP-668) Resolved issue where Change Text Case affects special characters not displaying in the variable text (base FP-530) Fixed issue where square box character appeared in Ruby Rule in some fonts Fixed issue where external formatted text resources default to left alignment when loaded into text frame When Tate Chu Yoko is enabled, vertical alignment is disabled. All font files created by FusionPro are now be removed after uninstall Fixed issue where when copyfitting, the magnification level of character width and height is reversed when dealing with vertical text If the bleed when exporting from InDesign is set to 0, sometimes a default bleed value from the print driver is inadvertently applied (Case FP-541) FusionPro v13.1.3 has the following fixes: FIxed infinite stack. Fixed crash when accessing Chart Properties on Mac. Allow installation of plug-in for InDesign 2024 point release 19.0.1. Show Auto Updater UI in selected FusionPro language. FusionPro v13.1.4 has the following fixes: Change page name sometimes crashes Cannot make new rule if language is Italian Improvements to Italian translations of Imposer GUI Black was not appearing in color dictionary on export from InDesign 2023 and 2024 Add/Remove Programs GUI had wrong uninstall version listed on Windows FusionPro v13.1.8 adds support for Adobe Acrobat Pro 2024 on Windows and Mac. FusionPro VDP 13.1 has passed testing on Windows 11, Windows Server 2022, macOS 13 (Ventura), and macOS 14 (Sonoma). More information about new FusionPro features and pricing can be found at: https://fusionpro.com/faq/ Look for even more new features in upcoming releases! Additional information about the FusionPro VDP 13.1 release, feature set, and addressed issues can be found in the FusionPro VDP 13.1.8 release notes as well as the FusionPro VDP Software Version History page. Upgrades and New Licenses FusionPro VDP customers can download the version 13.1 release from the FusionPro VDP Software Download page. Existing FusionPro VDP 11, 12, and 13 subscription customers can upgrade to FusionPro VDP 13.1 for no extra charge, with their existing FP11, FP12, FP13, or FSUB serial number. (If you are not sure whether your serial number is subscription, please contact Support.) If you are using FusionPro Creator versions older than FusionPro v11, please read our FAQs on information regarding FusionPro v11 and 12. FusionPro VDP Producer/Server and MarcomPortal customers who are active on their maintenance are entitled to an upgrade of their FusionPro VDP software. FusionPro VDP Producer/Server customers can obtain their upgrades by contacting the FusionPro VDP Support team while MarcomPortal customers can contact their MarcomPortal Support representative to inquire about the upgrade. Please note that pricing and upgrade eligibility may change at any time. MarcomPortal Support of FusionPro VDP Creator 13.1 Templates Templates from FusionPro VDP through version 13.1.4 are currently supported in the MarcomPortal application.

It sounds like you want to use Overflow pages. Please refer to the section "Overflow Text" in the FusionPro VDP User Guide, and to the installed Statement tutorial.

Yes, the correct answer now is to check the "Embed Fonts for Preview" box in the FusionPro Preferences. That supersedes the older advice to "Use Local Fonts." (As a forum admin, I do encourage looking for older posts before asking a question that's already been answered, but sometimes information gets stale, especially if it's over ten years old.). Clearing font caches is also old advice for much older versions of FusionPro and macOS. Since FP 11, with the new way of loading fonts, I don't think that will make any difference. Simply restarting Acrobat (and the FusionPro app on Mac) should pick up any font changes to your system and user profile. As far as fonts that "break" FusionPro, you may still run into those occasionally. Usually it's a font that's corrupted or non-compliant with the True Type or Open Type specifications. It sounds like you're already figured out how to use the fonts.err file to isolate those fonts. Please send any bad fonts to Support for examination. We are continuing to work to improve font handling, in an ever-changing landscape of font formats. I doubt that any font issues are due to Rosetta. In fact, I've run a very early Silicon native dev version of our Acrobat plug-in and there are no differences in how fonts are handled. There's really nothing processor-specific about font handling, though there can be changes in different versions of macOS, and Acrobat. As for "general display issues", if you're referring to problems with preview when the page(s) you're displaying do not fit completely in the Acrobat window, that's a known issue related to an Acrobat update, also not related to Rosetta. We're working with Adobe for a resolution to that.

You can use any API that can be invoked via a URL in FusionPro, by passing the URL to CreateResource(), like so: return CreateResource("https://quickchart.io/chart?c={type:'bar',data:{labels:['Q1','Q2','Q3','Q4'], datasets:[{label:'Users',data:[50,60,70,180]},{label:'Revenue',data:[100,200,300,400]}]}}"); You might also want to check out Google Charts: https://developers.google.com/chart Please be aware that most online APIs require a paid license. Also, we have improvements to FusionPro's chart generation on our roadmap. Please feel free to offer specific suggestions for enhancements or fixes!

This is equivalent to: for (var i = 1; i <= 4; i++) FindTextFrame("Name" + i).suppress = (Field("Version") != "Ver" + i); If you have groups of frames that you want to show and hide, you can set up named frame groups in the Document Overview palette and call HideFrameGroup or ShowFrameGroup.

I'm not sure what you did in your template. You probably missed a step. At any rate, the attached template demonstrates this working.ImpoChunkTemplate.zip If you can't get it to work in your template, then you'll need to post your files here.

If you try what I suggested, what do you get?

It can take a URL to a graphic or text file, such as this in a graphic rule: return CreateResource("https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/dca/Public Art/CloudGate.jpg"); If what the URL points to isn't a file that can be downloaded, then you will get an error, but it should still call the server.

So you must be calling either FusionPro.Composition.StartNewStack() or FusionPro.Composition.OpenNewOutputFile() in OnRecordStart. When you do that, capture the current value of FusionPro.Composition.impositionSheetNumber in a global variable, something like: lastChunkImpoSheetNumber = FusionPro.Composition.impositionSheetNumber; Then you can make another rule, called something like ImpoSheetNumberInChunk, which does this: return FusionPro.Composition.impositionSheetNumber - (lastChunkImpoSheetNumber || 0) + 1; And use the ImpoSheetNumberInChunk variable in the Text Editor.

You should be able to just do this: CreateResource("https://api.someurl.com/disposition.cfm?fpSessionid=1112221111&status=Complete&pages=234"); That will call the server and download the URL to a Resource object, though if you don't need that object you can ignore the return code. Also, depending on the version of the FP Server API you're using, there may be a newer version which has better performance. Please contact Support to explore options.

You can always repeat the last record, by setting FusionPro.Composition.repeatRecordCount in OnRecordStart. Note again that these are imposed sheets you're adding. In this workflow, a page is an individual coupon.

What do you mean by "a new store?" Is that a new imposed stack? Or a new output file? You might be able to do some math in a JavaScript rule based on properties such as FusionPro.Composition.impositionSheetNumber, FusionPro.Composition.recordNumberInChunk, etc.

You should be able to load most .js files with the Load() function. However, the JavaScript engine that FusionPro uses is based on an older standard, so some newer JS files may have syntax that it doesn't recognize. Let's back up a bit. Can you explain what you're trying to accomplish? There may be a simpler way to do it.

You mean two entire blank imposed sheets (the front and back of a duplexed sheet)? That would be a slip sheet, which you can set up on the Imposition tab of the Composition Settings dialog. This will insert the slip sheet at the end of each imposed stack.

For imposed sheets, you need to use $impositionsheetnumber (and $impositiontotalsheets). These are not present in the Variable drop-down, but you can copy them in there and click Insert.

Remember that the Producer composition is happening on a Windows machine (a Target machine configured in the FusionPro Producer Configuration app, on the Scheduler machine), not on your Mac client machine, so that Search Path in the rule, pointing to a local folder on your Mac, doesn't mean anything in the context of the remote Windows composition. You'll need to put those graphic files on a file share and use a Windows search path so that the Producer Target machine can find them. This should be a UNC path, starting with "\\", to a file share that is read-accessible by the account under which the Producer composition have been configured to run (also in the FusionPro Producer Configuration app). There are a couple of ways to do this. One, add the Windows UNC path to the Search Path box on the Advanced tab of the Composition Settings dialog in your job. Or Two, add the Windows UNC path to the Graphic Images Search Path box on the Queue Configuration tab for the queue to which the job is being sent. Ideally, the Mac would also access the graphics from the same file share that the Windows machine uses. You'll probably need an AFP or Samba share set up so that the Mac can access it. You may need to work with your IT team to set up the UNC share with a folder which has the necessary access permissions. You can contact FusionPro Support for additional assistance in configuring FusionPro Producer.

This is documented in the FusionPro User Guide, in the section "Overflow Text" (on page 226 in the latest version). Basically, you need to create a page of type Overflow in your job, and put a text frame on it that's marked as the Overflow Destination, then when you click that Overflow button for the Body page frame, you'll be able to select the Overflow page as the destination. Again, this is all documented, with pictures, in the User Guide.

In the code from the previous posts, in the pages loop, you can set: x.height = HundredthsOfPointsFromText("8.5 in"); That will set each page to be 8.5 inches in height, resizing the width proportionally as needed. Note that this doesn't exactly match your requirements, to be a maximum size and resize only if it's too large. If you want to do that, you can first check the size of the graphic by doing this: var tm = new FusionProTextMeasure; tm.CalculateTextExtent(x.content); if (tm.textHeight > HundredthsOfPointsFromText("8.5 in")) x.height = HundredthsOfPointsFromText("8.5 in"); Als, note that you could approach this job in a completely different way. Instead of using inline graphics repeating into an overflowing text frame, you could just have a single page in the job, with a graphic frame on it, and repeat the record the same number of times as the number of pages in the PDF you're bringing in (plus any other pages), then you can set the scaling on the graphic frame.

That's a good point. Compression is an optimization, and like all optimizations, it's a tradeoff, in this case between composition time and output file size. And of course, how each side of that tradeoff works is highly dependent upon the job and what features and inputs it uses. We have seen it make a big difference in file size in some jobs, as much as a 90 percent reduction, without any significant increase in composition time, but again, it depends on the job. That's why it's an option. Another thing you might consider is chunking the output to multiple files. A job with a lot of records and pages will get to the end of the composition and can take a while just to output the pages to a PDF file and write that file to disk. Chunking can alleviate this quite a bit.

It's very hard to offer specific advice about template optimization in the abstract. I'm imagining that there's some repetitive code or content in the various letter type options that you can reduce down, so that you don't have to use variable pages or text resources (or at least not as many of them), but I would have to see the template, or at least get more details, to make more specific suggestions. You might also consider upgrading to FusionPro VDP Producer (or Server) if you're regularly getting jobs that big. Creator is not really meant for such high-volume jobs. Producer will be able to compose the jobs more quickly, and in parallel with other jobs, without tying up your Creator machine.

If you want the first line indented, then you have to enter the value in the "First line" box. The Left indent applies to all lines after the first one.

Thanks. As far as I know, there is no updated version of that document. That said, there have been some improvements to accessibility in FusionPro 12 and 13; some of these are enumerated in the "Accessibility Features" section of the User Guide.

I wouldn't say that the "InDesign updates have broken FusionPro." It's just that there's a new version of InDesign which is not yet supported. FusionPro itself continues to work fine in the latest version of Acrobat, and in all versions of InDesign through 2023. Here's what I can tell you: We have completed QA testing with FusionPro on macOS 14 "Sonoma" and have found it to be fully functional and compatible. The upcoming FusionPro VDP 13.1 release should have support for InDesign 2024. I'm working on that right now. FusionPro 13.1 will also have a fix for the crash when viewing the log file from Producer. As for a Silicon native version of FusionPro for Mac, that is still in the works, but I don't have any time frame to give you. Sorry for the trouble. We anticipate that running under Rosetta will still be viable at least until the next major update to macOS.

Don't select Arial as the font. Change it to IDAutomation4State.

I think this should work, but I can't verify it without your job files: for (var i = 1; i <= 20; i++) { var colorName = Field("Color" + i) == "Blue" ? "Denim" : "Ash"; FindTextFrame("Box" + i).fillColorName = colorName; }