Quote from: DCurry on Today at 05:54:20 PMNot terribly impressed with a couple things so far - the Imposition window sucks (no preview, can't save presets, and making the crop marks behave is confusing as hell) and I'm surprised that you can't split the output while generating the merged file.

Yup, a lot of why I never used our version much to do jobs it should be more than capable of-just clunky with some unforgivable UI for as long as its been around. Good luck!

Ah, ok - I was starting to go down that path then just gave up for the day. The other "special" part of this is that each month has to have 2 potential images. I honestly think I'll make a Set A & Set B and that will have to do. This fucking thing is WAY over-promised - oh and it's a promo job so as usual there's NO money in it. 

Another XMPie question - when using multi-page PDFs as variable image assets, can I tell XMPie which page of the asset PDF to show? We do a lot of postcards and I want to place p1 of the PDF on the first page and p2 of the same PDF on the the 2nd page. The name of the PDF is pulled from the data.

I realize I could split the asset PDFs into 2 PDFs and do it that way, but I'd rather leave them as 2-page PDFs. Currently I can only make it show the first page.

I think your data needs to have 12 columns - 1 for each image like the screenshot below. Also I don't think you'd need a rule - just tell each picture box what field to reference for its image.

Thanks a ton - I'll try to take a look at those files this week if I have time. Today I worked on a file where whoever set it up built it more in line with my thinking and the guy who showed me how to do it probably just doesn't know the easier way.

Not terribly impressed with a couple things so far - the Imposition window sucks (no preview, can't save presets, and making the crop marks behave is confusing as hell) and I'm surprised that you can't split the output while generating the merged file.

Quote from: Slappy on Today at 04:20:02 PMMy head hurts.

When I read your first paragraph my first thought was "My head hurts". Great minds think alike!

Not sure this is possible using SmartStream, but one of our internal "geniuses" has promised a set of 1000 calendars to be produced where say Company A gets 12 calendars, and for every piece, the month's main pic is randomly assigned from a pool of images supplied. So all 12 calendars may use the same images, just placed differently within each month's spread.

And of course, the back page will need the 12 thumbnails to match that same random order. My head hurts.
I did a few Data Sets, here are the first 2, but when I output the 2nd data set, it doesn't follow the Rules (screenshot) and only uses the first "ImageName" pic - for ALL the image placeholders.

Placeholder	ImageName
Image1	TestImage1.jpg
Image2	TestImage2.jpg
Image3	TestImage3.jpg
Image4	TestImage4.jpg
Image5	TestImage5.jpg
Image6	TestImage6.jpg
Image7	TestImage7.jpg
Image8	TestImage8.jpg
Image9	TestImage9.jpg
Image10	TestImage10.jpg
Image11	TestImage11.jpg
Image12	TestImage12.jpg

  

Placeholder	ImageName
Image1	TestImage2.jpg
Image2	TestImage5.jpg
Image3	TestImage7.jpg
Image4	TestImage9.jpg
Image5	TestImage6.jpg
Image6	TestImage11.jpg
Image7	TestImage10.jpg
Image8	TestImage8.jpg
Image9	TestImage12.jpg
Image10	TestImage3.jpg
Image11	TestImage1.jpg
Image12	TestImage4.jpg

In reality for Prepress work on a Mac you probably need the Mac Studio, $2599 with 64 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD with the 27" Studio Display minimum $1599 so $4198 + you need to buy a keyboard and mouse. That is crazy compared to what we used to get the 27" iMacs for. My old place owners would faint at the thought of buying 10 of them.

Quote from: Joe on Today at 07:49:16 AMAnd to be honest if I were still in Prepress and making decisions on what to buy I would have to consider using a PC. I'm not a fan of disposable Macs.

That is the current thinking of anti Mac management atm. The PC's they run on business side have a life expectancy of around 15 minutes, but on the upside they are cheap (compared to Mac).

They can't understand why we can't use them. So in the meantime, the best course of action is to do nothing. Our adobe stuff stopped upgrading at 2021 version (still paying full price for Adobe subscription though), Macs are late 2012 and running 10.14 Mojave, latest they can run is 10.15 Catalina and I just don't have the energy to update 3 of them and then troubleshoot all the associated issues that will arise, for the limited improvement that will come from it.

It is expected that a replacement PC will last the same amount of time as the Macs did without upgrading, we all know that is not the case, but that message is being received poorly.

Going PC will resolve some networking issues, but that is all I can see them doing. My opinion is it will be a backwards move, but I'm not paying the bills.

Ok, I have created a couple of different examples of layer visibility rules you can look at. The demo 1 file uses both standard rules and an audience rule.

Demo 2 uses standard rules and shows how to control multiple layers with one rule.

Basically, you just want to return a string and if the layer name matches that string it will be on, otherwise it is off. you can control multiple layer names by concatenating the names with a | (pipe) symbol.

demo files

If you have any questions let me know.