Sometimes it is required to indent second and other lines to make a hanging effect like this:

Contact: phone

contact: fax

contact: email

On the other hand, you don’t want to have 3 fields for phone, fax and email - just one “contacts” field will do.

There is a simple solution to this little challenge now: insert tabs before fax and email to align them right under phone like in the example below.  User input will be adjusted to align under phone as well.

Read more in web-to-print help post.

2 new web-to-print features were released last week, but stayed in the stealth mode until now.

Bulleted text can now be mixed and matched with other fields within the same frame like in this example. Note that all the text is in one paragraph frame aligned to vertical-center.

Read more here.

Paragraph style matching

Different paragraphs within the same paragraph frame are now matched to user input and retain the original styling, including color, font, alignment, spacing, etc. The following example is a single input field.

Read more here.

Uploaded images can now be manipulated right on your web-to-print site as shown in this quick demo video.

Go to My images under Maintenance. All images except TIFFs have edit link. Your web-to-print users have the same functionality as you.

We need your feedback.

Once we are confident it works for you and your users we’ll move the editing to Template Preview page. Users will be able to edit their images at the time of ordering without leaving the page.

Web-to-print image editing functions

1. Rotate left / right
2. Crop
3. Delete
4. Undo (revert to the original image)
5. Make a copy

Please, suggest other functions your web-to-print users may need.

Yes, we did it again. The site was only partially functional for about 40 minutes today. There may be another scheduled outage later today, but won’t be longer than a couple of minutes.

Sorry

Our web-to-print Image Library page got a small re-vamp.

1. There is no difference in web-to-print Image Library page for printers or for end users any more.

2. Users can upload images directly into the web-to-print image library.

3. Images can be deleted asynchronously one by one or all in one go.

4. Long file names are truncated to the last 50 letters, which should be enough to the file name and a bit of a path. This is likely to be noticed by IE6 users only because all good browsers do not include the file path.

Watch out:

• Go to your homepages and click REFRESH to get the latest style sheet. Frequent users have them cashed.
• Tell us if the layout breaks (long file names, different height of boxes, etc) with your images.

Sorry, we had a break. All web-to-print development was stopped due to loss of direction in the team. Now we are back on track with renewed energy and clear goals. Web-to-print rocks!

User registration improved

Users registered by printers are expected to click on the link and enter their details themselves.

Printers can enter new user profiles and type in their details, including passwords. Despite that, new users were still required to click on the link to log in. It was an unnecessary step, now removed.

Transparent images

Transparent images were handled inconsistently by our web-to-print software resulting in loss of transparency in most cases. It has been fixed in the latest update. Some minor issues still remain:

• TIFF and GIF files may appear on the screen differently as thumbnails. There is a colour shift in the palette for indexed colour.
• TIFF files with ZIP compression are rejected. However, ZIP layer compression is OK.

There are many flavours of PNG, GIF and TIFF files when it comes to transparency handling. Check before using them in your image libraries and let us know if something does work as expected.

WMF files are not allowed

Sorry, not any more. There were too many security issues with them and they are not used that widely to be of a concern.

More changes to come

You will see more changes to our web-to-print user interface in the coming days. They will be deployed one by one and your feedback sought before moving further.

1. Changes to the page layout - cleaner, more space

2. Changes to uploaded files handling - cropping, rotating, resizing, deleting, etc.

3. More interactivity - scripting and asynchronous processing will be added here and there

How much would it cost to build a web-to-print website where customers can design products online?

$5!

This type of interactive websites is usually built using Adobe Flash. Users can interact with the design as it was a desktop application. It’s nothing like using Photoshop, CorelDRAW or Illustrator, but the basic design manipulation features are there.

How to install it

Download the script and read the installation instructions.

You need a website where to place it.

Ask a web designer or a site admin to help you with the installation if this is all too technical for you.

More than a fancy toy

This script can be more than a fancy toy if you install a PDF generation add-on and provide a good library or background images.
The major problem with “design it online” sites is that users who can produce a design already have all the tools they need on their computer. Your site needs to provide sufficient value through catchy images to offset the hassle for those who don’t have the designer streak.

Application of latest Microsoft patches to our Windows 2003 Server machines went terribly wrong. We are trying to bring them back to life.

Update: all back to normal.

The overall downtime was less than 2 minutes. Some users had to try more than once to get through.

We had a 2 hour outage due to a failure of the monitoring software. A minor error escalated to a large problem. It took an hour to get noticed and another hour to fix.

Unfortunately it was peak time for some of our customers and they missed out a few orders. Our fault. Guilty as charged.

Released only minutes ago, some long awaited user management features to make life of web-to-print printer accounts easier.

Add user and User profile page

You can add a user to the web-to-print database and then assign the user to multiple web-to-print catalogs using a new user profile page. You can still do it per-catalog.

Full user profiles can be viewed on the new user profile page. Profiles accessible through Add user or clicking on user name in lists of users per catalog.

You can edit profiles of your customers, but only for those without a password. Once the password is set up the profile can be edited by the user only.  More …

Anonymous orders can be assigned to users

An order placed by an unregistered user can be assigned to an existing user or a new one. Click on Assign to user link on order details page and follow the instruction.  More …