Decompiling an MDF File
Posted by Daryl in Design How-To, Problems on June 19th, 2009
I was asked this question again yesterday, and I can’t recall how many times I have been asked about this over the years.
Can you make an IFD from an MDF?
Alternately, “I’ve lost my form design files (IFD’s), can I get them back from the compiled forms?”
The answer to the question is no, you can’t. And I’ll explain why.
When you compile your IFD into an MDF file for use with Central, what Design does is actually generate the appropriate printer code right then and there. This is part of what makes it so fast – there’s no interpretation from the design to printer language (or PDF) when you produce your output.
What that means is that when Central is using your form all it needs to do is send that already-generated code to the output target. It also means that the original design is lost in the process.
So, please, treat your IFD’s as irreplaceable – and keep them backed up.
How To Print MICR Checks
Posted by Daryl in Design How-To on April 27th, 2008
Well, first off you’re going to need a MICR printer. If you don’t know what MICR is (say mick-ur), it’s Magnetic Ink Character Recognition. This stuff pre-dates high speed optical scanners, and in some ways is still more accurate.
There are a lot of things to remember when you’re setting up to print cheques, even before JetForm gets involved, so let’s run through some of them. Read the rest of this entry »
Output Designer on Windows Vista
Posted by Daryl in Uncategorized on March 20th, 2008
Yes, you can install and run Output Designer on Windows Vista. It’s actually not hard to do, but because this stuff is all new to everyone I’ll provide lots of screenshots to make it easy to follow.
First, you might be starting off your installation with a pre-packed web archive – which would be one file – or an expanded directory of files.
If you have the single file, you’ll want to run that first and expand it somewhere as follows. If yours is already expanded, skip down three screenshots and start reading again.
Read the rest of this entry »
Central and the HP 1022n
I’ve gotten a few requests lately for information on using these (and other) printers with Central. People try to send forms to them, but they don’t print. Instead they see garbage or nothing at all.
JetForm/Accelio/Adobe Central is as fast to print as it is because it does not send a completed and rendered raster to the printer. All that the printer gets is, in the case of HP’s, PCL. It uses the smarts built into the printer itself to RIP the code to pixels for printing. As a result, the files sent down the line are much, much smaller than any spool you’ll ever see come from a Windows (for example) application.
Optimising Central Logging Levels
Posted by Daryl in Central How-To on July 11th, 2007
Did you know that if your logging levels are set too high you can be severely impacting your printing performance? Highly detailed logging levels are routinely set on development and even testing systems, and by default, but are usually not needed on production machines. Regardless, when production machines are configured they are usually left at default settings and/or their settings are transported from development or test.
If your logging levels are turned all the way up, you can get insane improvements in speed with very little effort and only a teensy amount of risk. So what are you waiting for?
There is, in general, only one situation where you need to turn up your logging level: When you are counting pages to print “Page 1 of 10″, “2 of 10″ and so forth. Your first printing pass on one of these needs to have logging turned up enough to catch the trace statements that record the numbers, so follow my instructions carefully if you need this. (There are other uses, but I’m not going into all of them now.)
Changing Logos On The Fly in a JetForm Form
Posted by Daryl in Design How-To on June 22nd, 2007
This has got to be one of the most-asked questions ever. Either you have sub-companies and you want to print different logos depending on the company, or you want to print different addresses for different branch offices – or you want to do both.
Here I will attempt to explain how you can change logos on the fly using nothing more than a piece of information from your data file.