1.6
Table Of Contents
- Table of Contents
- Welcome to PlanetPress Connect 1.6.1
- Setup And Configuration
- System and Hardware Considerations
- Installation and Activation
- Installation Pre-Requisites
- User accounts and security
- The Importance of User Credentials on Installing and Running PlanetPress Connect
- Installing PlanetPress Connect on Machines without Internet Access
- Installation Wizard
- Running Connect Installer in Silent Mode
- Activating a License
- Migrating to a new computer
- Information about PlanetPress Workflow 8
- Upgrading from PlanetPress Suite 7.6
- What do I gain by upgrading to PlanetPress Connect?
- Server Settings
- Uninstalling
- The DataMapper Module
- Basics
- Features
- Data Mapping Configuration
- Data Mapping Workflow
- The Data Model
- Data Source (Settings)
- DataMapper User Interface
- Defining Boolean Values
- Defining String Values
- Building String Values
- Defining Integer Values
- Building Integer Values
- Defining Float Values
- Building Float Values
- Defining Currency Values
- Building Currency Values
- Extracting dates
- Entering a date using JavaScript
- Defining Object Values
- DataMapper Scripts API
- The Designer
- Generating output
- Optimizing a template
- Generating Print output
- Saving Printing options in Printing Presets.
- Connect Printing options that cannot be changed from within the Printer Wizard.
- Print Using Standard Print Output Settings
- Print Using Advanced Printer Wizard
- Adding print output models to the Print Wizard
- Splitting printing into more than one file
- Variables available in the Output
- Generating Fax output
- Generating Tags for Image Output
- Generating Email output
- Generating Web output
- Release Notes
- Copyright Information
- Legal Notices and Acknowledgments
Other ways to speed up script execution are described in another topic: "Optimizing scripts" on
page539.
Images
When a template that contains lots of images is merged with a large record set, the many file
requests may slow down the process of output generation. The solution is simple: combine the
images into a single image file and display the part that holds the image. This reduces the
number of file requests and can improve the output speed significantly.
Step 1. Create a file that contains a collection of images.
Static images may go in any type of image file. Store images that need be added dynamically to
the template, in one PDFfile, one image per page.
There are several tools to combine image files into a singe PDF. ImageMagick is one of them.
You could use the convert command of the ImageMagick library:
convert C:/myimages/*.jpg C:/myimages/image-collection.pdf
You could also use Connect Designer itself: create a print template with the size of your
images and set the page margins to 0. Create a script that loops over your images and adds
them to the text flow of the template. Subsequently generate PDF output and use the resulting
file as your collection file.
Step 2. Add the file that contains the collection of images to the template's Resources
(see "Adding images" on page455).
Step 3. Display part of the collection file as an image in the template.
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Static images that are part of an image file can be displayed via Cascading Style Sheets
(CSS). This technique is much used in web design. In this technique, the file that contains
a collection of images is called an image sprite. The trick is to create a Box (or Div) for
each image and give that box an ID (see "Boxes" on page432). Then use the ID in a style
sheet to select the Box and write a style rule (see "Styling templates with CSS files" on
page467) that sets its background image to the image sprite and positions the image.
For an explanation and examples of this style rule, see
http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_image_sprites.asp.
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Dynamically added images are loaded in a script. To retrieve one page from a PDF file
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