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June 17, 2016
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Arbortext publishing with APP

  • June 17, 2016
  • 1 reply
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Hi all,

we are currently authoring in Arbortext 7.0 with Styler and we are using APP to publish our documents in PDF. Everything is working perfectly, except something which I would like to know if it can improved.

The setup as it is, requires 3 passes to output PDF, meaning that it goes through all pages 3 times before the PDF is generated. This is ok for small documents, but usually we publish large documents of around 600-700 pages.

Is there a way to improve that so that we speed up the publishing process?

For example, is there a way to configure how many passes will be run before the PDF is generated?

Thank you very much in advance for any hints/tips/assistance.

Tasos

Best answer by SimonTaylor

Hi Tasos

The number of formatting passes APP makes is driven by how 'stable' for generated content is between passes. What this means is that items such as indexes, tables of contents and cross references must be consistent between formatting passes before APP will generate the PDF. They might not be consistent because the action of outputting these potentially changeable things can have an affect later in the document on the pages some other content items appear on. APP will make a minimum of two formatting passes but can take as many as needed.

The print configuration file allows some control over this. If you open 'standard.appcf' in Editor and save it as something else, then you can edit some of the print configuration options, including formatting passes.

formatting.png

The 'compareMode' option allows you to choose how APP decides whether the generated text is stable. The options are:

  • None - APP performs no stability check, it is up to the user to set the minimum number to something they think will work for their document and give good results
  • Checksum - after each pass APP will generate an internal checksum value and then compare it with a value generated in the previous pass
  • Stability - APP checks whether certain items have changed since the last formatting pass. This option typically uses one pass fewer than 'checksum'.

The maximum and minimum number of passes you want APP to take is also provided as an option.

There are often other things you can do to speed up PDF production in your stylesheet. Some things to look for are:

  • Heavy use of 'gentext' to do un-necessary things (eg - don't hide a block of content only to gentext it out again inside a table if you want to put a border around it)
  • Poorly written XPath expressions have a huge impact on performance - avoid '//' location paths
  • Poorly written conditions - avoid lots of 'if' statements which are testing the same thing - use the nested if/if-else/else' conditions in Styler
  • Un-necessarily nested blocks
  • Lots of column balancing
  • Lots of graphic conversions (particularly CGM)

I hope this helps

Simon

1 reply

S
SimonTaylor14-AlexandriteAnswer
14-Alexandrite
June 20, 2016

Hi Tasos

The number of formatting passes APP makes is driven by how 'stable' for generated content is between passes. What this means is that items such as indexes, tables of contents and cross references must be consistent between formatting passes before APP will generate the PDF. They might not be consistent because the action of outputting these potentially changeable things can have an affect later in the document on the pages some other content items appear on. APP will make a minimum of two formatting passes but can take as many as needed.

The print configuration file allows some control over this. If you open 'standard.appcf' in Editor and save it as something else, then you can edit some of the print configuration options, including formatting passes.

formatting.png

The 'compareMode' option allows you to choose how APP decides whether the generated text is stable. The options are:

  • None - APP performs no stability check, it is up to the user to set the minimum number to something they think will work for their document and give good results
  • Checksum - after each pass APP will generate an internal checksum value and then compare it with a value generated in the previous pass
  • Stability - APP checks whether certain items have changed since the last formatting pass. This option typically uses one pass fewer than 'checksum'.

The maximum and minimum number of passes you want APP to take is also provided as an option.

There are often other things you can do to speed up PDF production in your stylesheet. Some things to look for are:

  • Heavy use of 'gentext' to do un-necessary things (eg - don't hide a block of content only to gentext it out again inside a table if you want to put a border around it)
  • Poorly written XPath expressions have a huge impact on performance - avoid '//' location paths
  • Poorly written conditions - avoid lots of 'if' statements which are testing the same thing - use the nested if/if-else/else' conditions in Styler
  • Un-necessarily nested blocks
  • Lots of column balancing
  • Lots of graphic conversions (particularly CGM)

I hope this helps

Simon

    N
    nlg_admin1-VisitorAuthor
    1-Visitor
    June 21, 2016

    Dear Simon,

    all is clear and thank you very much for your assistance. Some of the things above we can improve, unfortunately some we cannot, as we receive the documents/styles already prepared from our client. All make sense though so we will work towards improving what you suggest.

    All the best,

    Tasos

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