I have created a picture object and hardcoded the Image path. The image is actually located on a NFS-mounted network drive, but there is a symbolic link on the print server that our IBM Infoprint 2000 is connected to that points to the image. However when I compile the form on our printer, the image will not show up.

Our current form (using version 4) is using "passthrough" logic, but I wanted to use the simple dynamic way.

Has anyone ever experienced this problem?

Thanks!

Make sure you have a UNC Path in your file name. Make sure your printer can access this server.

Rapha

Thanks for the quick response, but I checked the UNC path and it looks correct; however I have a theory about why this is happening.

I recompiled my test form and checked the box for forcing the postscript to be dumped out. I went down in the code to where the "&restype" was being checked and I found my path had been converted to all uppercase. This would still work on Windows as it's not sensitive to case, but in a Solaris enviroment, case does matter. Could this be the problem?

I tried another test using "passthrough" and the same UPC path was found.

Does this make sense? If I have to use "passthrough" as a workaround, how would I know the "x_pos" and "y_pos" for displaying the image where the image object is defined? Is there any documentation on the "passthough" command and its parameters?

I know I am asking a lot at one time, but I really appreciate your help.

Thanks!
Tim Dull

Tim,

Passthrough is exactly that - it passes through whatever string, postscript or otherwise, that you specify.

I don't know the IBM info print machine and I am not familiar with what you describe as a symbolic link pointing to the image resource.

PlanetPress dynamic images normally work by having the images either in the file system or Virtual postscript disk on the PC running planetPress or on the hard disk of the printer. If you have a printer disk that is available for downloading images it will appear on the PP printer status sheet under "devices".

You use Tools >Image downloader to convert your images to postscript and download them to the printer's hard disk. At the same time you can download them as postscript files to the Postscript virtual drive on the PC. This will enable you to see the images in design and preview modes.

You use a PressTalk expression to define the name of the image in the image object. Search the help for "Image Paths" for examples of usage and further info on how dymanic images work. A printer disk resident image will be accessed with an expression such as ='image1.jpg' or a combination of literal and data selection expressions.

If the Document is executing on the printer it looks for the images on its local hard disk. If the document is executing on the PC host, it looks first for the image as an image resource within the document and then on the virtual PS drive.

The "Run Locally" option causes the document to execute on the PC host which is necessary only if the images are only accessible locally (i.e. on the virtual PS disk or in the PC file system). This causes a fully compiled print stream to be sent to the printer as if sent from any Windows application. If "Run Locally" is not checked, the PS program (Document) will execute on the printer and fetch the images from the local drive.

The least efficient way to do dynamic images is to have them in the file system in their native format. This is slow, the images do not get cached and the Document has to Run Locally to be able to fetch the images at run time. The image path would look something like ="C:\\images\\PlanetPress\\Image1.JPG"

When the images are put on printer disk or host Virtual PS disk they are converted to PS and optimised and cached (if suitable caching options are set).

I hope all this will help you.

Adrian

tdull01,
I have done what you are trying to achieve. If
I refer to the beginning of your post you have a NFS-mounted network drive that your RIP can see.
Here is the PressTalk for the solution:
Define(&filename,string,'H://TestImage//TEST')
crlf(0.125)
gsave()
passthrough('300 300 true &filename PrintJPEG')
grestore()

There are to image commands:
PrintJPEG
PrintTIFF

Of course this means you are limited to those image types. There ia also another recipe that I may provide you for EPS images.

Hope this helps

Regards