The Print Manager has had many revisions up untill now. Slowly but surely we are going to make a leap forward by the introduction of the Print Manager V2.
While the new V2 is not ready for production yet, we do like to give you a tease about what is to come.
File Module V2
A long standing gripe is that moving files in and out of the Print Manager is quite cumbersome.
Idealy you would like to have any storage medium, be it local or in the cloud, be able to connect to the Print Manager so you can use your existing folders and files.
To that end we've created new File Module which allows you to define 'StorageObjects', which in turn point to an existing media like a local drive, FTP server or in memory.
In the future we will add cloud providers like Google Drive and Azure Blobstorage.
Once you've added a StorageObject, you can simply explore the folders and files remotely asif using Windows Explorer. Your StorageObjects are mounted as drive-like folders in the root of the File Module.
Then with the full power of a directory you can do the same thing as you would with Windows Explorer: create folders, copy files, delete files, etc.
Therefore all file interactions in the Print Manager are now simply based on (relative) paths/URI's.
VectorCompose
We've also made a big leap in our composing module.
In our V1 model we are placing graphics on a raster/pixel canvas. This means we'd require the input graphic to be of the exact same raster format as well (resolution, color depth, colorspace, etc). This lead to a workflow whereby we needed to do a lot of pre-processing to align the source image settings with our canvas settings.
Doing these pre-processing steps meant we were limited on how we could extend and speedup our process.
To that end we've rebuild the entire composing engine on top of a vector format (i.e. SVG). This means we now work primarily in vector space which means we just work with numbers which represent size, direction and operation instead of a bulk of raw pixel data. This has some key benefits:
- We can reuse and embed (custom) graphics manipulations through scripts
- Natively interact with the canvas using mouse, touch and keyboard
- Smaller file size and quicker rasterization
This enables us to do things we couldn't before like:
- QR & Barcode generation
- Dynamic text
- Translation, rotation, scale and flipping
- Custom variable substitution
- Multi resolution rendering
- Etc.
While far more capabilities are implemented and possible, we are still in the prototype phase.
In the coming months we will be conducting trails runs to verify and finalize an initial version of this new VectorCompose module.
Once we have more details, we will let you know!