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.

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.

Cost centers are of no interest to casual customers, but regular business customers, specially corporate ones love them. Their accountants do, perhaps.

We always had an option of giving a list of cost centers per catalog, but it may be hard to maintain, so we added a new feature - free text cost centers.

Simply enter * as the only text in the cost center text box in catalog details and the user will get an additional field for entering a free text cost center in the order form.

More details here.

Fresh off the web2print development mill - changes to the printer interface.

New menu format

The main menu moved into a horizontal line at the top of the screen.

The side bar on the left shows catalogs and templates only.

Web-to-print order list

You need to click on Orders link in the menu to see order folders with order counts.

Web-to-print orders report

Orders report now includes most of payment information, if there was a payment made.

It has only the last transaction details. E.g. if you refunded the order it will have the refund transaction, not the original payment.

PDF settings for Web-to-print

PDF settings are now managed from a separate page.

Empty Deleted folder

Every catalog has a setting for order retention. The default is 6 months. You can reduce it down to 1 month per catalog.

Clicking on Empty next to Deleted on Orders page will permanently delete any order that are older than the set retention period in the catalog as well as all deleted test orders.

Orders can be deleted only after you paid for them.

Demo

Watch a quick demo of the new interface

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.

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

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 …

In case you haven’t noticed, there are 2 new features to make your web-to-print site a bit better.

Catalog icons and web-to-print homepage layout

Web-to-print catalogs used to be lists of text links. Now they can be replaced with icons or images like in this example:

Images can be made in Photoshop in any size or format.  Read more in Catalog icons post on web-to-print help website.

The web-to-print homepage layout can be changed showing one or more of the following blocks:

• Popular templates
• Catalogs (as images or text)
• Latest templates

Read more on web-to-print homepage customization.