DSweet

Thanks Step. If I use your expression would that only remove the number exactly prior to the extension such as just the 1 in the name "JobNumber_1.pdf"? Would that expression also effect the number 12345 as is "12345-JobName_1.pdf", or again would it only effect the "1.pdf"? I sometimes have to put job numbers within the name of the output file prior to a "descriptive name" or "client name" in the output file.

Dan, a while back you had given me this script to pad zeros in a batched output file where I could set the amount of padding... if (Int(FusionPro.Composition.JobOptions["FinalPrint"])) { var oldEnding = FusionPro.Composition.currentOutputFileNumber + "." + FusionPro.Composition.outputFormatExtension var originalNameNoExt = FusionPro.Composition.outputFileName.replace(oldEnding, ""); FusionPro.Composition.outputFileName = originalNameNoExt + FormatNumber("000", FusionPro.Composition.currentOutputFileNumber) + "." + FusionPro.Composition.outputFormatExtension; } Up to now it has been working like a charm...as do most if not all of your suggestions...however I have now made the jump to FusionPro 9.3.15 (need to update my signature line) and it is not working as per normal. I would expect output names such as..."JobName_001.pdf", "JobName_002.pdf", "JobName_003.pdf", and so on. I've set it to 3 digits in the script so I expect a three digit number with leading zeros. However I am now getting "JobName_1001.pdf", "JobName_1002.pdf", "JobName_1003.pdf". FOUR digits and the first is always a "1". At first I thought it might be because the batched amount was going to be larger that the 3 digits will allow, but what I added a fourth zero to the script it just added another zero to the padded section and still put the 1 in front. Also if I put the extension ".pdf" in the output name section command line I'm giving to FP Server I get output names like "JobName_.pdf1001.pdf", "JobName_.pdf1002.pdf", "JobName_.pdf1003.pdf". What happened from FP8 to FP9? A new command for padding zeros in the output? .

How could I rewrite the code line FusionPro.Composition.SetBodyPageUsage("Page3",!(useOverFlow("Frame Name")));to be more to the likes of if the result of useOverFlow is true activate "Page2", if false activate "Page3"? I know there is a way to do it in a single line of code but I'm not too sure of the structure. .

Now I'm really puzzled. Even more than normal. I've implemented all the suggestions that you and STEP have mentioned in this forum and I have a template that works but only when I do it one up. Again, as soon as I put any kind of imposition on this FusionPro encounters a Fatal Error and stops (on both Server and Desktop versions). I get the dreaded Error Code 1096. The .msg file mentions something about not being able to implement a SetPageUsage command so FP doesn't know what to impose. If it didn't know what SetPageUsage to use on the 2-up why oh why did it know what SetPageUsage to use on the 1-up from the same file? I would like to send the file to you but it is way too big for this forum space to allow. Dan, I'm sending this to FusionProSupport@PTI.com via email and will give it the name "AGL_LetterFiles". Will you be able to take a look at it in the near future? .

Actually Dan what I needed was a conditional set of Overflow pages. Each document (record) MUST BE two pages long. The only "variable element" in the document is a table that grows as more items are purchased by each customer in the data file (up to 20 items). As the table grows it will push the page to a second side. On that second side there are other disclaimers and element items other than just the letter that are to be duplicated on the back as they appear on the front. That was the problem that I had...knowing when the table would grow large enough to cause an overflow to the second side to occur. When the overflow was needed then put the disclaimers and graphics on the back in their proper places while the letter would flow to the back as well. If the letter did not need to overflow and all fit on the front then only a blank page with a page counter at the bottom left was needed. No graphics, no disclaimer, no extras. There are several "versions" of the base letter and each version would overflow at a different length of the table and sometimes a table entry itself would wrap around in the row cell because the entry was so long to need more space than the single cell line would allow making the table slightly deeper. I attempted to come up with some sort of formula to count a certain number of lines for each letter, table and other elements and when a "page line limit" was reached then I would turn on and turn off the proper back page. I've enclosed a sample of two records...one that overflows and one that doesn't. Everything would have been so much easier if there was some type of rule, frame property or check to determine if the "Overflow Page" or even the overflow frame/text box on the page was activated or not. STEP's formula at least gives me something that is measurable for a conditional statement. It may not be "perfect"...but I'm not doing government work here. Thank you for your help STEP. .

STEP, It's been a while since you posted this and I've just now been able to get around to testing your suggestion. First of all I want to thank you...your suggestion worked...almost. For some reason when I used your statement for FusionPro.Composition.SetBodyPageUsage("Page3",useOverFlow("Frame Name"));it didn't work as expected. It activated Page3 at the same time the OverFlow page was activated. I had to "negate" the rule and program it as FusionPro.Composition.SetBodyPageUsage("Page3",!(useOverFlow("Frame Name")));before it would work correctly. Close enough for me. Now that I have it functioning like I need it to I went back to take a look at what you did. I understand all the steps except the rule that contains the regular expression string. What is that string actually processing and how is it affecting the overall string that is being "replaced" in that rule command. Also what is the "function(a,b)" part? You've given me the fish...and I'm grateful...but now I'd like to get one on my own. .

So I am restricted into only being able to do this by a color-tag? I am not able to predefine in the Colors Palette the color "schoolColor" and then redefine it in OnRecordStart? This way I would be able to just use the color as part of the pull downs when assigning it to text and frame elements?

I'd like to chime in on this with an additional twist to the problem...we are doing items for different area schools and would like to have type and backgrounds output in their specific school color. We are being supplied with either a PMS color or a cmyk build-up for their color. Either way we have the ability to get the base cmyk build for each school. My problem is that if we do 100 schools, I would probably need to individually program around 60 or maybe 70 specific colors for the different schools, then create a rule to change the color to one of this variations. I would like to stream-line that down to just one definition. Is there a way to have a predefined color name, in my example say "schoolColor", and then within the data file dynamically read in the color values and assign it to schoolColor. So for records 1 thru 10 every variable item in the template that is defined with "schoolColor" would turn a specific color of Blue for School-A, then when records 11 thru 25 are read in the definition of "schoolColor" is reassigned to a cmyk variation of Red or Green or Pink or whatever school is being processed at the time. Having to predefine and program less than 100 schools and colors might not be too bad, but if this program takes off we might be doing 1000's of schools with virtually any number of school colors. That's a headache that I don't want to be hit with. Any help would be appreciated. .

I too get a bit confused sometimes when fonts are used not as expected. In order to get Univers Bold I would normally think that I could just bold the Univers Roman font and get it. SURPRISE...Univers Bold in FusionPro is actually the bolded font Univers Light. If you bold Univers Roman in FusionPro you get Univers Heavy. To get around this and to really determine how FusionPro sees certain fonts that might be a bit confusing before I start a project - especially when I'm using a large variety within a specific family for "Corporate Identity" reasons - I will go into InDesign and type out a single sentence and duplicate it a number of time. Then I change each sentence into a different font using all the various flavors that I might need during this project...Regular, Bold, Italics, Bold-Italics, Heavy, etc... Then I simply export that document into FusionPro and look at how it interpreted each font. I may be a bit of a pain but you will get an exact match. Also if certain fonts did not fully load into FusionPro for some reason...this will also show you which ones and not available so you can stay away from them. It's a bit of a sledge-hammer approach, but I hope this wil help you. .

Is there some validation check, property setting, trigger or whatever the wording might be to let FusionPro understand when an OverFlow Page becomes necessary and when it is not? If I have a 3 page document with page 1 as my main page containing a multi-paragraph letter and other graphics, can I have an OverFlow Page as page 2 and then an "unused" Blank Page as page 3. If the text from the first page is long enough to cause the OverFlow Page to activate with all its graphics and text flows, then page 3 (blank) will remain unused. However if the text from page 1 is not long enough to cause the OverFlow Page to activate then a rule within OnRecordStart will cause the unused page 3 (blank) to be set to true and activate that as my second page. Another thought (question) would be can I program conditional OverFlow Pages? If this condition is true then activate OverFlow Page 1, else activate OverFlow Page 2? .

Still no word from PTI support about this but...I've been doing some more checking and testing with this template of mine in regards to the problems I'm having with "keeping with next paragraph" not working when I flow from one page to another. I've sort of narrowed it down to this... One of the paragraphs that I wanted to flow over to the next page was, thankfully, one that did not contain any variable information in it so the paragraph lines were static in length. Each line always broke at the same spot all the time. I separated those lines into individual lines of text with a hard return at the end instead of keeping them as one continuous flowing paragraph. Then I set each line except the very last line to "keep with next paragraph". Once the last line of the "individualized paragraph" was pushed down far enough that it flowed over to the over-flow page in my template all of the individualized lines in the "paragraph" flowed over with it. This worked as I needed it to. If any one of the individualized lines wrapped around even by just a few characters into the next line this flow was broken. Single line...worked. Multiple lines...not worked. When I needed to keep two paragraphs together (in my case a signature block and the paragraph above it) I just set all the line of the "above" paragraph, including the last one, to "keep with next paragraph". As long as they are all individual lines this also worked. The other paragraph contains variable elements so I can't break the lines up since the flow of the variables will undoubtedly push line lengths and wrap them around on their own. I hope this "work around" will help others that would like to use this feature of "keeping with next paragraph". I'm using this feature because the template is a series of welcome letters for an insurance company and the body of the letter contains the individual policies and information that the addressee has signed up for. Sometimes those policy information packets and descriptions run on and on and on. This will at times push the signature block at the bottom of the letter to the top of a second page. The client was fine with some pages being two sided and some not, but they didn't want "just the signature block" to run over to the back page. That looked rather silly and unprofessional so they wanted at least the paragraph above the signature block to flow to the next page as well. On some letters this paragraph above the signature was static on others it contains variables. Oh well! .

I few months ago I reported a problem that I was having with FusionPro. It was determined to indeed be a bug in the program and I received a report-ticket number (FP-12234) for my request to fix. Where can I look to see if any releases past my current version have addressed and fixed this issue or not? I used to see a few of these FP-##### report tickets referred to in the Release Notes of previous releases of FusionPro, but I haven't seen many in the recent ones from 8 to 9. Is there any place to log into that lists these ticket numbers that are being worked on, or fixes scheduled to be included in upcoming releases? .

I also put my IMB in a separate box no matter if I need to put it above or below my mailing address. Having the mailing address text in a separate box gives you much greater control over the spacing that can be used. I usually like to turn on the copyfit function for that text box but instead of having FusionPro change the point size of the characters to make it fit, I will change the copyfit function from "text" to "leading". Then I will make my address box just barely big enough to fit inside the window allowing for the tap-test tolerances. For the majority of most mailings when there are only 3 to 5 lines needed, the spacing looks quite normal and well spaced out. For those few occasions when there are 6 or more lines (had as much as 10 once and that didn't include the imb line as well) then only those few (usually 5-10% of the mailing) will look somewhat squished. .

The problem is related to the "Widows not working as expected" thread that I started. According to Alex there is a bug in FP when "keep with next paragraph" is flowing from one text linked frame to another. It's been pushed to your Engineers and I have a case number for it. My current problem arises from having to force-code a rule to break to the next page using a work-around that Alex suggested '<page destination="TopOfColumn">'after a variable length table that is being translated from English to Spanish for some letters. I put this rule in front of a paragraph that I need to break to the next page. However when that table grows to a certain length the table itself will flow from one linked textbox to the other. When that tag-rule is then used it is looking for "the next page" which doesn't exist and then rest of the letter is being dropped. When I am doing this in an English version of the document every item that is being added to the table is ONLY one line long and everything is easy-peasy. By just counting the number of rows in the table as I build it I know how far down the table grows and when to turn on or off different rules to properly "force break" the paragraphs as needed. The "Spanish"-fly-in-my-ointment is when these items are being translated to Spanish some of the item names are two, three and even four lines long. The table still builds correctly and puts the items in the proper fitting rows...but the row height has now changed so if something fit when it was 10 items in English, the same 10 items in Spanish would wrap completely different. I've uploaded an example with data that I made up forcing what I'm referring to. The very first item (Reparación de Calefacción...) in the table is actually just a single item that stretches that cell down four lines. Other items can stretch the cell to 2 or 3 lines while others are just one. The first record shown on pages 1 and 2 flows properly from page 1 to page 2 because the table doesn't fill the first page. The table created from record 2 starts on page 3 and flows over to the linked second page of the document (page 4) and therefore the force top of page rule is now looking for an additional page to flow the remaining paragraph into. That page won't exist. I can't count on the items for any Spanish version to be one line or even always 2 or 3 lines each time. There is a list of over 200 items that are being variably selected in the data file and of those over 20 of them are more than one line in length for the chart. A Spanish chart could contain all 1-line-items, or any combination of 2- to 3-liners or more. It's truly in every sense of the word a "variable" length chart! Once your Engineers fix the bug I found everything should be fine, but I have no idea as to when that might be and I can't go back to my customer ans simply say we can't do that because of the software we use.

Dan, After the table is fully built, is there anyway of determining the finished height (from header-to-footer) of the entire table structure in points? .

In addition...would "ANY and ALL" text rules that are part of this text frame cause this to happen, or just those rules that are from the point on that I would like the break to happen? If say I DO NOT set the paragraph options for the top 2 or 3 paragraphs of the frame to "keep with next paragraph" and not set the widows to 99 but have those settings as default being un-checked and set to 2, but I DO set the bottom sections including (from bottom to top) the disclaimer (a variable rule), the signature section (a static floating signature), and the paragraph that contains a variable but not within a rule; would this cause the error that I'm having? The top section and the bottom section MUST agree even when not necessary? .

I've made the changes that you suggested (I un-checked the "override box" for all the resources) and I recomposed...the same result. I even thought FP might be reusing the old .def and the .dif files so I renamed the document with a "_v2" suffix on the end and composed...same result. The "keep with next paragraph" is not working as expected and it is only moving the bottom most single line of the paragraph to the linked frame. I've re-emailed the revised template to Alex (the one who responded from support) with the changes. .

Dan or anyone else that can help... I am trying to keep paragraphs together between two linked text boxes. I have set the paragraphs with widows set to "99", and I have checked "keep with next paragraph" to activate it. This however does not work. The entire paragraph DOES NOT flow from frame 1 to frame 2. Only the exact amount of lines that are cut off move to the next frame. To further infuriate me the leading after the paragraph function does not work as well and all paragraphs flow from one to another with no spacing between them. To offset this I have been forced to put a space between each paragraph. Does that somehow negate the "keep with next" function? .

Dan, I have a "similar-but-not-quite" question as to this...instead of using a copyfitting function on a text box (the customer does not want the leading or the font to change size of the letter) I need to link to a second box on the back of the page. That part is simple by using the link text frame button presented in the tools. However a variable disclaimer is the last paragraph of the letter being composed. The customer requires the disclaimer to be printed on the front page as well as the back when and only when the text flows from a single page to a second page, it is only to be listed once on the front page if the document fits within the one page. In not really able to use a textMeasure function since I'm not really copyfitting anything within the box. Or is there a special case of the copyfit function when it is used in conjunction with a link feature between two boxes? In short...when everything fits on one page only use the disclaimer from the letter paragraph...if letter flows to a second page via the "link text box" function (not using an overflow page) then the disclaimer is displayed on the back from the composed letter and a new text box is "unsuppressed" to show the disclaimer on the front page. Any thoughts or suggestions? I hope! .

Hello community... I would like to be able to use the JDF feature within the newer versions of FusionPro but I do not have any experience with them. I will be creating files for a Nuvera 144 that will accept JDF files. When I used the previous commands via postscript (setpagedevice) I was able to do the tray pulls that I need. However the files get to be so huge (around 400M for a rather simple set of pages) so I would like to be able to do this via pdf files. What do I do with the separate "jdf" file that FusionPro creates? I understand the programming part via the edit pages section of FusionPro, but where do I load this file on the printer for the template to use it as a description for the pages? I would have thought that it would have been something incorporated inside the pdf file itself and not a separate file altogether. .

I apologize for my answer then...it was the only way that I knew of for assigning the correct matching Pantone color from an original document. This may require a little experimentation. Let me see if I understand this... If I create a new "Spot Color" and name it say Pantone 032C in the colors palette of FusionPro BUT assign it cmyk values of (100, 50, 100, 0) which are values for a dark green, then FusionPro will produce the dark green within the PDF file and will show up as that on a screen view, but a high-end printer (iGen3 or HP Indigo) that can be set up for Pantone color matching will see the "ink color defined as Pantone 032C" and will print it as the correct red color? Hmmmmm .

Tattoued, As far as I understand there is no feature to add colors from a "color library" like InDesign, Illustrator, or most any other design layout program would. Pantone colors can only be added when you 1) export a document from either InDesign or Quark with those colors already defined in the layout program to begin with, or 2) add them from another FusionPro template that does contain the needed Pantone colors using the "Advanced>Import" feature to copy them over. If you have certain clients that use specific colors over and over (color branding), then I would create a blank template that contains those colors and just keep importing them whenever you start a project from an existing PDF file. If you normally go from either InDesign or Quark, then have a layout template for each of those with those color already defined. Hope this helps, and good luck. .

Using the same scenario of the "growing line", how would I program this line BETWEEN 2 variable length columns (unknown amout of lines in the column) but of similar length (both columns should be 1 line off from each other)? .

FusionPro VDP Creator 8.2.7 is my "Desktop" version. We also have Producer API (Server) at the same level. I've taken your advise and put in a call to customer support, but all I could do was leave a message. They have not called back as of yet. .

Thanks for the quick reply Dan. However I guess I need to talk to someone in sales or something. When I tried to do an AFP output file for a test I get the message "AFP Output is not allowed with this license. Composition stopped". I will be checking with Customer Service about this but just a quick question for the rest of the forum followers... I thought that with FusionPro if the option is available to select (at least in the in the Desktop version) then you can use it? Since "AFP" is a selectable option on my composition output screen I was under the impression that I would be able to use it? Apparently not. .