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farns

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Everything posted by farns

  1. Well I had to google what "RTFM" meant. I'm sorry I've been such a pain for you today, that you felt the need to use that kind of language. I used to be fairly competent with the basics of fusion pro server, I've used it off and on since it was called DL-1000 v 2.0. I've just not ever been a very advanced user and there's no real training available, that I've ever been able to find. I'll just muddle through this on my own, I apologize for the hassle.
  2. Unusual bundle? Yeah, we're an unusual shop :-) FusionPro isn't our primary VDP application here. But MarcomCentral is our primary storefront system. We got Server for a very specific project, and that project went belly up 6 months later. I have been discussing the imposition limitation in JD with my BRM. Perhaps in the future it will work, but right now there are a lot of limitations with that software. We really like it though, hope to see it really improve. So I think I follow what you're saying about editing that IMpositionDefFileName. Alternatively, could I create several copies of that file, calling one 5x7, another 10x7, etc... so I'd have about 40 different CFG files in the folder, and then just call the one I need through that batch file? Or does the CFG filename have to match the format file name? My other problem, is I collected the template out of Fusion Pro Desktop, and I'm trying to call it with server. I'm rusty on this, but I think I'm doing it all right. But instead of composing, it's throwing pages and pages of errors. I don't think this is all of it, it goes way beyond my screen. But does this give you any clues as to what I've got wrong here? Looks like my FusionPro Creator is 9.2.20, and my FusionPro Producer (is that the new name for server, or am I more confused than I originally thought? LOL) is 9.3.9... I also re-collected the job on my server, but that didn't seem to fix it. Any thoughts you have on this would be greatly appreciated. thanks! **I had to cut a bunch of this out, it was too long to post it all **
  3. Dan, I should clarify here. I have FP server, but I use it very very little. It was a bundle with our Marcom purchase and we have used it for specific projects, but I'm not very savvy with it. Anything I have had it do, I'm writing the command manually (or I have built scripted batch files to execute commands). That's kinda what I'm thinking I will be doing in this scenario. I cannot produce imposed sheets out of Marcom Central on Job Direct products, so I'm needing to handle that another way. Presently I'm downloading all the orders by hand, and then I've got a 5x7 FP template, a 10x7 template, etc... I'm opening each one, running the required records, and the moving on to the next one. I was hoping I could find a rule that says "if Product ID = X, then use FPI file #4" or something like that. I'll have to play around with your suggestion and see what I can figure out. thanks!
  4. Dan, I found this old thread, asking the same question I have. I understand your response about needing to do this through FP Server. I do have Server, and I'm wondering if you might share some guidance or ideas on how I would do this? I haven't done command line execution in FP Server for a long time, but is there a way to call a specific imposition file or would I need to build multiple FP templates each with the proper imposition file attached? I have 42 different possible templates on this project and trying to figure out how to make the press file generation go smoothly. Files are ordered in Marcom as a Job Direct product, thus no imposition in Marcom is possible. Trying to find a way to do it offline before it goes to press. Thanks in advance, Farns
  5. Dan, I'm revisiting this thread for some new insight. I used this solution about a year ago to tackle a project and it worked great. Now I'm trying something new. I have a client who is doing their own VDP composition and sending me PDF files which are very great in number. Some have 300,000 pages in them! We are working with them presently using a band-aid solution with our pre-press software, Preps. I use Acrobat Pro to break the 300,000 record file into 3600 record chucks, as we run this job 6-up, and want 600 sheets in a stack. I'm toying around with automating this with FP (and ultimately letting FP Server do all the heavy lifting). I don't care if I have to break the files into chunks still, that's super easy. But if I was able to feed the original file in, that would be even more awesome. But the problem I'm running into, as others have mentioned, is the 6-up imposition doesn't work, because even though there are 3600 "records" in the pdf file, FP sees the file as "1 record". I've been re-reading this trying to understand if there's another approach... Is there a way for me help FP see that every two pages in the PDF constitutes a new "record" or "instance"? I'm not sure I'm asking for exactly the same thing as other users here, but I'm not sure I'm following all the responses.
  6. Visiting an old thread because I too am having the same problem. I am making a "tiles" expression, and a short name like ED or BOB is not expanding to fill the space. I just updated to 3.2, but that doesn't seem to have fixed the problem. I have tried various fonts, no improvement. I have tried various settings on the min/max point sizes, no change. I'm wasting tons of space in my Expression, and I can't figure out what to do differently. Attached is a screenshot. The Expression is just a simple proof of concept for right now, a 64x16 field.
  7. Dan, sorry for the lateness in my reply. Been buried with other production projects the past few days so I'm just now picking up the development stick again. Lemme try to get all your question answered: 1. I can certainly try to mockup a dummy file and send to support, but I think at this point I am going to have better luck solving this particular problem outside of FusionPro. Somebody suggested PDFtk, and I gave that a quick try yesterday and had awesome results. So I"m gonna pursue that path for a bit, and then return to this if I need to. 2. Sorry if I was not clear before on page counts. No, not 10,000 pages... on a big day we get 10,000 orders, but they are spread across several products types. I do not combine all together, I combine all for one type together. Brochure, Flier, etc. etc. So my biggest component yesterday was 2600 PDF pages. There are a number of reasons for this consolidation. Partly because of the way we get the files from our client, partly for improved speed in our finishing processes, and partly for ease of accountability. This project in unique in many ways to the work I've done my entire career. But you're right, I may be asking too much of FusionPro Creator. I need to update my profile I guess - I though I had... I had a very old version of Producer (DL-1000 v3) at my last employment. I'm at a new shop now, that is driven by a different VDP platform, but it has some gaps. FusionPro was filling those gaps nicely. We've talked with Terry about getting API, and we may still in the future, but we don't have it or have immediate plans to invest yet. At any rate, this discussion has been very valuable, it has helped me understand 2 or 3 parts of the puzzle a little bit better. I'm gonna pursue the PDFtk option this week and revisit this if needed, but I think for now we can call this one closed. I appreciate everybody's input! Farns
  8. Well I was able to make files in a couple different formats... VDX was same size, JLT was 2x the size, both of which were within my expectations. I tried PPML and another one I was unfamiliar with, both crashed my machine, but I don't think I wanted to pursue those anyhow, since I want to be able to look at the PDFs as mentioned above. I will look at the PDFTK option you mentioned, if there's a way to script that with variable filenames, perhaps it will be an adequate replacement for FP on this particular process. Dan, I'd love to show you the files, but these are ones I have to work on in an encrypted volume that's locked inside our datacenter. One of those kinda jobs :-) I realize this will hinder my ability to get some help on this as well. For most days, this isn't a problem. Under 1000 orders, it's usually no sweat. But when we have a 5 or 10,000 day, that's when it become a challenge. I was mainly concerned that there might be some optimization settings I was not aware of, that would allow these PDFs to stay a proper size, but it sounds like that isn't the case. Dan, I"m just using the script I linked to in the first post, with some very minor modifications to help me get through a variable-named path to get to the files needing to be consolidated. And the basic composition settings I've used my whole life, which I've never really studied in great depth. So I was hoping there was something easy I was just overlooking.
  9. I am bringing them into a variable text frame via that script I linked at the top of the post, so that actually makes sense, that somehow that makes it so acrobat cannot properly optimize them. When I get today's batch of data I will try the other formats to see what sizes I come up with. The reason bypassing FP and doing in acrobat is no good, is we're talking hundreds of files per day, so it has to be automated, and it has to be accurate. Handling the files individually is not an option. The composition preview is not up to my liking either, as it's just low rez raster preview, unless there's a setting to retain vector quality that I do not know about. I'll report back on the different output types later this morning, this one really has me curious now. Are there other methods for bringing in PDFs into a document other than the way PTI teaches in the original post?
  10. That is good to know about the PPML format. I too like to be able to look at the print files that I need to send, and the preview engine on the 7600 is junk. PDF has always been my favorite, so I'm hoping we can get this figured out. I have been searching through everything I can get my hands on and I'm not getting anywhere. But as with most issues, I'm not sure I know the right keywords to search documentation for. Frequently, I find that it's right there in the docs, but under keywords I would have never suspected.
  11. Also... I'm doing this as PDF to an Indigo 7600. I know nothing about PPML and other such formats. I used to make VDX for a NexPress, and loved that format, but I don't know if there are other formats that FP can make, that may be more efficient for the Indigo. I'm open to any ideas there as well.
  12. I am sorry. I forgot to specify that I am on Windows running FP Creator 9.1
  13. Good morning, I am using a modified version of the script I found here: http://forums.printable.com/showthread.php?t=37&highlight=insert+pdf to do exactly what I need for my project. It works wonderfully, and takes a number of small PDFs and consolidates them into one file that is much easier to deal with in production. However, we're starting to get a larger number of these files, and I've noticed that the composed PDF is many times larger than the parts going into it. For example, yesterday's run consisted of 40 variable data PDFs (about 2600 12x18 pages), totaling just over 2 GIG. The output PDF after running through the above script was 21 GIG. More than 10x inflation. If I manually consolidate the files, by opening the first one, and then adding the other 40 or so after that, and save that file, I see a dialog box that tells me it's consolidating backgrounds, removing duplicate fonts, etc. The resulting file size from this manual process weighs in at at only 1.17GB, reduced down even further from the sum of the parts going into it. I assume that is because there are items that can be consolidated within the entire group, that may exist in duplicate among the separate files. Is there a setting in composition that I can't find that will allow this optimization to take place? I'm really struggling that I can't find anything to help me keep these file sizes down. What am I missing? Farns
  14. hmmm. Ok so it sounds like Producer will not be a viable option, at least in the context of this project. So what other value does producer bring to the table then, just the ability to run FP on a server platform and the ability to serve as a central server to crunch all the jobs that multiple workstations send to it? I'm trying understand it's capabilities enough to be able to intelligently recommend to the boss whether to invest in it or not.
  15. Greetings, This is my first post in this sub-forum, I have been a FP Desktop user for years, and used the OLD server version, when it was called DL-1000. Used that up until about 4 months ago when I switched to a different company. Now, I'm kinda caught up a little bit. I am on Windows 8 running FP Creator 9.1 on Acrobat XI. I apologize in advance, this post will be a little long, but I am hoping to get some answers as we are evaluating the potential purchase of FP Producer (not the API version) and I need to understand if it can do what I need. I am attempting to use FP to fill in a gap not provided by the VDP software my new print shop uses. We need the ability to merge multiple PDF files which each have varying page counts into one file for production. Our in-house VDP solution does not do this, but FusionPro does it beautifully. I found this post: http://forums.printable.com/showthread.php?t=37 and downloaded the file, made a few adjustments and I am getting exactly what I want, as far as the output is concerned. However, here are the challenges I need to overcome: Problem #1: I cannot run this job on my desktop. By client requirement, it must happen on a secure server in my in-house data center. A server has been setup for this client specifically, and as I understand it, the only way to run Fusion Pro on this box (Windows Server 2012) is to buy FP Producer. Is this accurate? A subset to this, is we are tinkering with a Windows 7 installation in a virtual environment on that server, and considering moving my desktop license from my machine to that virtual box. However, this does address problem #2: [*]Problem #2: My company is seeking a fully automated workflow for this project, which is being handled beautifully in our other software, all but this PDF-consolidation part of that process. My experience tells me that FP Producer API would solve this, but it's too expensive, so we're looking at the FP Producer option, and I have about a week left in my trial evaluation of the software. I have tried and tried, unsuccessfully to get the job to run, and here is the details of that problem: The files come in to me daily in a dated folder, such as "2014Feb20". The resources I need to get at each day, are a couple levels inside that folder. The subsequent folders are standardized in name and can be hard coded in my script & rules, but the top level folder name is different every day, as it is the date. When I run my job that works fine in FP Creator over on FP Producer, it doesn't seem to want to follow the rules to get to the assets, it seems to want to collect all the assets, and send them to the Producer working directory to then compose the file. So if a job has 40 records, I'm getting 40 blank pages, instead of 40 combined PDFs which could be hundreds of pages long. It reports no error and thinks it did the job right. So rather then diving in to HOW to fix this problem, just yet, I need to know if I am even barking up the right tree at this point. I need to know if: It is possible to "schedule" jobs in Producer. I keep seeing the term "scheduler" but I do not seem to see any way to schedule a job for automatic execution. Even if it's not command line driven, can a job be ran without touching it. Even if that means leaving Acrobat open and running on the server at all times. This is the most important part. If there is a way to run jobs hands-off, then let's further the discussion. If not, then I may as well not spend the $8000 and just do this by hand in Creator in the Virtual Machine on the secure server. If we can do that, then is there a way to have the project run as I have engineered it, so that I can access these dynamic paths to get to the assets where the customer has placed them? What thoughts do any of you have on this? Am I on the right path or barking up the wrong tree? Thanks in advance, Farns
  16. I have a project I do almost daily, that requires the output to have all the fonts be outlined, rather than type. So every day, I open the output file in Illustrator, select all and "convert to outlines". It just dawned on me today that there might be a smooth work around posted here. I can't find anything so I thought I'd ask. These are 1 page pdfs, black and white only, and it's output for a vinyl cutter, so it's just purely outlines, nothing fancy. I have other work arounds I do here too, but wondered if there wasn't a way I could just make the artwork *RIGHT* from the get go. I compose these files both on v. 3.something if I run them through the Server version, and I'm on v. 6.something if I run them thru desktop on my primary machine. Both are windows based. Thanks in advance! Farns
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