The only way to apply watermarks to previews to stop freeloaders nicking your designs was to have preview and printing templates. Not the easiest way of doing it, admit it.

Watermarks are “easy as” now!

The Desktop Layer of Master Page in your web-to-print template is now showing on preview images, but is excluded from the final output (PDF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, CDR). It allows you to place watermarks on every preview image and forget about using printing templates.

Pity we didn’t come up with this idea earlier.

Desktop Layer behavior

Desktop Layer of Master page:

• shows on top of all other layers on every page
• shows on previews if you check the “printer” icon ON
• never shows in the output files (CDR, PDF, JPEG, GIF, PNG)

Converting your existing templates

Having preview and printing files for a product slows down the processing 2 times or more. The user may have to wait many long seconds for the order to process. Removing the printing template will fix the problem. It may be just too much work to re-upload your all your templates, so we have a deal for you …

If all your watermarks are in the same font not used anywhere else in the template we can easily re-process your templates, move the watermark text to Desktop Layer and kill your printing templates. You can download the file afterwards, if you need it.

Let us know.

There used to be a ridiculous limit on the number of fields in a web-to-print text frame. it was a real impediment to many good web-to-print designs where shifting up and down was a requirement.

This limitation has been removed. There is still a limit, but 1024 characters should be enough for a long list of fields! Tell us if you ever need more.

Previously, the preview image size was calculated proportionally to the page size and you had to have a border of the same proportions if there was no background. It was confusing and inconvenient when users typed in text that went outside the limits - previews would get distorted.

Detailed instructions were placed in a web-to-print help article.

A recent change in the processing algorithm allows to calculate the proportions using all objects in active layers for the page. The previews come out without distortion even if some text breaks the boundary.

The theory and the practice

It is possible that some web-to-print templates will not produce correct previews. Most likely they will produce HUGE preview images or fail. We will spot unusual error rate, but would like to hear from you of you notice anything unusual.

Fresh from the web-to-print mill - field editing.

Before you proceed, click Home and then click REFRESH in your browser to get the latest style sheet, if you haven’t got one yet.

This change affects Printers and Designers only. The end users do not have access to the same screens.

Go to the preview page and click on the field name

The form expands and opens a sub-form as in this screen grab.

You can:

• Change the field name
• Add a hint that shows under the input control when the user clicks on it.
• Change single line text boxes into multiline and vice versa
• Force case
• Limit min/max length
• Limit user input (characters)
• Re-format phone numbers
• Provide a list of values for a drop-down

Click Close to leave the fields untouched or Save to apply changes.

The only user change is the hint showing under the input field where you provided one.

Roundtrip of name changes

Changing a name using this screen does not affect the template, yet. We may add the roundtrip change later on so that changes through this screen edit the template as well.

Missing bits

Oops … we had to roll back ALLOW, DISALLOW and PHONE NUMBER FORMATTING  due to a compatibility conflict. A fix is expected in a day or two. No good.

Just a reminder for users trying out our service that we are not after your wallet - send us an email that you are still on a trial and we’ll wave the bill. Really, we have no problem with that whatsoever.

By the way …

An interesting post about printing quality at one of the largest US online printer offering novelty products - Zazzle.com. Those guys are doing great in terms of traffic and popularity. They have lots of interesting social features, but it turns out the quality of the print lets them down. At least it did on this occasion.

Coming changes

The sidebar with the main menu, lists of orders, catalogs, etc. will be very much simplified and possibly removed. Don’t be shocked when you see the entire width of the screen used by the page content.

This change will be enabled for printers only. Your customers will still see the current layout. We will need your feedback before applying to your customer screens.

You might have noticed by now that the User List page has changed with an addition of a new text area for your personal message to the user.

The message comes at the top of the email followed by the link they need to click on.

The screen capture below shows an email without a message.

The personal message would appear immediately before  the text you see in this example.

User Profile page changes

Order List and Order Details now link to the User Profile page via user email or the ID for unregistered users.

You can use it to manage user details, including entering their email addresses.  It can be done only if there is no password set for the user. Once the password is set it is up to the user to make changes.

Order List Page

Orders are titled by user reference, if such exists and the product name appearing in brackets. Otherwise the product name shows as before.

it may be a good idea to send an email to your active users and tell them about this feature. Make sure you have “Hide Reference” checked off in template details. Reference text box shows by default, unless you checked it off.

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.

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.