Preview & Copyfit

Preview & Copy-Fit [since 7.4]

Content Station ships an editor that supports multi-channel editing of articles in WCML format. Enterprise Server offers web services Content Station can talk to. A workspace folder can be created at server side to temporary store the article and the layouts it is placed into. Having that in place, previews, PDFs and copy-fit information can be requested. At the back-end, the server integrates Smart Connection for InDesign Server to do the actual previewing, PDF generation and copy-fit calculation for the article being edit.

The following features are in place:

Preview optimizations [since 7.4]:

Preview optimizations [since 9.5]:

The following services are added to the workflow interface (SCEnterprise.wsdl):

CreateArticleWorkspace
	Ticket
	ID (nil for new articles)
	Format (‘application/incopyicml’, used for file extension, and for text conversion?)
	Content (embedded XML, taken from article template)
CreateArticleWorkspaceResponse
	WorkspaceId

Since Enterprise Server 9.5, when the ID parameter is provided, the Content parameter can be set to nil. In that case, the latest version of the article is retrieved by Enterprise Server and put into the workspace folder. This saves time for remote workers and/or large articles.

ListArticleWorkspaces (used for recovery only)
	Ticket
ListArticleWorkspacesResponse
	Workspaces
		WorkspaceId
		WorkspaceId

GetArticleFromWorkspace (used for recovery only)
	Ticket
	WorkspaceId
GetArticleFromWorkspaceResponse
	ID (nil for new articles)
	Format
	Content (embedded XML)

SaveArticleInWorkspace (used for auto-save only)
	Ticket
	WorkspaceId
	ID (nil for new articles)
	Format (‘application/incopyicml’, used for file extension, and for text conversion?)
	Elements (dirty frames only, nil when Content is used instead)
		Element
			Content (embedded XML, of one frame only)
	Content (embedded XML, used after adding/removing text components)
SaveArticleInWorkspaceResponse
	[empty]

PreviewArticleAtWorkspace (does implicit save at workspace)
	Ticket
	WorkspaceId
	ID (nil for new articles)
	Format (‘application/incopyicml’, used for file extension, and for text conversion?)
	Elements (dirty frames only, nil when Content is used instead)
		Element
			Content (embedded XML, of one frame only)
	Content (embedded XML, used after adding/removing text components)
	Action (Compose/Preview/PDF)
	LayoutId
	EditionId
PreviewArticleAtWorkspaceResponse (Preview/PDF do Compose implicitly)
	Placements
		Placement (copyfit info)
	Elements
		Element (word/char/para/line counts)
	Pages (nil on Compose)
		Page
			Files
				File
					FileUrl (taken from 8.0)
					L> http://.../previewindex.php?ticket=12&
					workspaceid=34&action=preview&pageseq=1&
					layoutid=56&editionid=78&articleid=90
	LayoutVersion (as used, can be auto updated server side)

DeleteArticleWorkspace
	WorkspaceId
DeleteArticleWorkspaceResponse
	[empty]

Spread Preview [since 7.6]

In the Multi-Channel Text Editor of Content Station, the user can toggle between single page and Spread Preview mode. In single page preview mode, the preview pane of the editor displays all pages that contain (a part of) the article only. In Spread Preview mode, when an article is placed on one page of a spread (but not on the sibling page) the sibling page is included too, just to ‘complete’ the spread view.

Related to this feature, when an article text frame runs over two pages of a spread, it should be visualized on -both- pages with a gray box in the preview pane. (Before, only one of the two pages showed the gray box.)

In this chapter, the following terms are used:

Term | Meaning —————:|—————- spread | Left and right page together (as shown in InDesign). sibling page | The other page of the spread. Talking about the left page, the right page is the sibling page, or vice versa. placement tile | Part of a placement. When placement (text frame) runs over two pages of a spread, it gets ‘divided’ into two tiles; One tile that fits on the left page and one tile that fits on the right page. Both tiles glued together has the same shape/dimensions as the placement itself.

When an article text frame (from now called ‘placement’) is placed on one page of the spread, but also partly covers the sibling page, the placement is enriched with two ‘tiles’. As long as a placement fits on its page, there are no tiles. When one placement covers two pages, there are two tiles, each with coordinates and dimensions relative to the corresponding page. For a tile, Enterprise keeps track of placement db id, page sequence nr, left, top, width and height.

A PlacementTile is new workflow data type added to the SCEnterprise.wsdl. The Placement element has a new property named Tiles, which is a list of PlacementTile elements.

When a layout is stored (through CreateObjects / SaveObjects services), the Smart Connection plug-ins for InDesign send tile info along with the page placements. This happens only when necessarily; when the placement fits on the page, no tiles are provided. Enterprise Server stores the tiles in the database in a new table, named smart_placementtiles.

When the layout and article are stored at the server, the Multi-Channel Text Editor of Content Station can request a preview through the PreviewArticleAtWorkspace service. This service has a new parameter named PreviewType, which can be either ‘page’ or ‘spread’. In single page preview mode, Content Station sends ‘page’ and in Spread Preview mode, it sends ‘spread’.

When it comes to preview generation, Enterprise Server calls InDesign Server through SOAP, and feeds its JavaScript module named IDPreview.js (which can be found in the server/apps folder). That module talks through scripting API to InDesign Server and Smart Connection plug-ins. This integration is responsible for returning previews of pages containing article content. Results are written in the composedata.xml file in the user’s workspace folder (server side) along with the generated preview files. So far, nothing new.

If an article placement is placed on a spread (for example: one text frame on pages 2 and 3) and the new PreviewType parameter is set to ‘spread’, IDPreview.js returns previews of -both- pages (one that contains the article, and one that does not).

When a placement has tiles, Smart Connection plug-ins provide Tiles information through the frameData JSON. This info is read by IDPreview.js and is written to the composedata.xml. Therefore, the XML structure is expanded with a <tiles> element that may occur inside a <textframe> element. Inside, a list of <tile> elements provides info about the dimension of each placement tile.

Enterprise Server (more precisely: the previewArticleAtWorkspace function of BizWebEditWorkspace class) parses the composedata.xml file and composes the Tiles structure returned through the PreviewArticleAtWorkspace service response.

Content Station now displays the Spread Preview. The logics behind placing pages left or right are implemented in Content Station. This depends on the reading order. Therefore, the ReversedRead property is introduced in the PublicationInfo and IssueInfo elements in the workflow WSDL (SCEnterprise.wsdl). This reading order info is returned through the LogOn response.

For the Publication Overview in Content Station, the placement tiles are also important. Without tiles, Content Station won’t know if a text frame of an article runs over the other page of the spread (or not). Therefore, Enterprise Server returns extra PlacementInfo elements through the GetPages service (as called by Content Station for the Publication Overview). For each placement, but now also for each placement tile, a PlacementInfo exists.

When a layout is sent to the Trash Can, the tiles remain in the database (in the smart_placementtiles table) so that the tiles are available again when the layout is restored. When a layout is removed permanently (purged), the tiles are removed from the database.