OL Connect Release Notes 1.6.1

Overview

This document provides an overview of the new features and enhancements in OL Connect 1.6.1.

The major focus of Connect 1.6 has been to improve performance and increase stability, as well as launching a new option for the PReS Connect and PlanetPress Connect brands called OL Connect Send.

Installing OL Connect 1.6.1
  • OL Connect is released as a 64 Bit version only.
  • Full details on installing and licensing OL Connect can be found in the online help in the installer.
  • Note that the software comes with a 30 day trial license by default.

Connect 1.6.1 General Enhancements and Fixes

Performance improvements
  • Changes to the handling of transparency in PDF backgrounds has not only cured some job failures, but has also led to substantial improvements to both output speeds and filesizes.
  • Improvements made to the clean-up processes, improving overall production speed.
  • Some memory leaks plugged, improving overall production speed.
  • Improved reliability when using MS-SQL as back-end database.

Further Performance improvements can be found detailed in the Output Enhancements and Fixes section.

Documentation improvements
  • Help layout changed to allow easier navigation, and the content improved.
  • Broken links within the Welcome Screen have been fixed.
Installer improvements
  • Microsoft SQL Server can now be setup as the back-end database during the installation process.
Print Manager improvements
  • Support added for IPDS printer status (SNMP ).
  • Improvements with handling and deleting of overlays for some IPDS printers.
  • Disable printer capabilities check when the printer is busy, to reduce connection problems with older printers.
  • Improved support for Xerox IPDS 495 printers.
  • Improved error handling when IPDS structural errors are encountered in IPDS resources. The Print Manager now reports the error and ceases sending the job to the printer.
  • Print Manager would hang when unexpected errors encountered on IPDS printers. The Print Manager now checks for fatal errors and exits the running job when one is encountered.
  • Improved robustness when encountering Communications Errors. For example, the errors previously encountered when removing a job whilst Print Manager was retrying a connection.

Connect 1.6.1 Designer Enhancements and Fixes

General Designer improvements
  • Interface improvements such as inclusion of icons for different types of files (js and CSS).
  • Provided option to configure the script timeout period.
  • Minor issues with non-English language translations fixed.
  • Display issues that were sometimes encountered when changing section background images have been fixed.
  • Issue with Virtual Stationery not being enabled when adding VS PDF in Formal Letter Template wizard now fixed.
  • Fixed an issue in which resizing an abs box in some scenarios would result in an additional box being displayed.
  • When typing in a non-English input language (such as Hebrew), the keyboard input would periodically switch to English. This issue has been fixed.
  • Saving a template when in Source view would erroneously show snippet content within the Source view thereafter. This has been fixed.
  • HEX encoding option added to DataMatrix barcodes.

Connect 1.6.1 Output Enhancements and Fixes

General
  • Merge Engine memory leaks fixed.
  • Improved creation of Metadata after content creation.
  • Improved conditional content for Email output.
  • Some templates containing JPG or Bitmap graphics could trigger the flatten.exe program (used for flattening external files) to repeatedly open, causing performance degradation or even failure.
Email Output
  • Fixed issue with the email Subject field not being encoded properly when using characters other than Latin characters.
  • To improve privacy certain Meta tags that were embedded in the output email HTML have been removed. These include "email-reply-to", "email-from", "sender-name" and "sender-address".
  • The Date field was not always included in the email header. This has been fixed and the Date field should now be present in all email headers.
Print Output
  • Improved processing speed for jobs involving separation that create multiple output files.
  • Improvements made in the conversion of PDFs to other formats have made such conversions significantly faster and the output smaller, in PCL, AFP and IPDS output.
  • Improved page range handling on last page.
  • Improved N-Up positioning.
  • Improved color support on older AFPDS and IPDS printers.
  • PDF and TIF objects are now marked for optimization in AFPDS output
  • Vector graphic processing improved, resulting in much faster output, and smaller file sizes.
  • Issues with AFPDS Highlight colors have been resolved.
  • Issues resolved with missing non-Latin characters (such as the dyet "Đ" character) in IPDS PDF Pass-through jobs.
  • If an image file were replaced on disk between runs then a subsequent Proof printing would display the old image, . This has been fixed.
  • Merge engine no longer slows down when using external JavaScript files in print sections.
  • Fixed "ApplicationException: Null" errors encountered in some PCL outputs.
  • Added support for shaded bitmap fonts to allow printing of grey text on supported IPDS and AFPDS printers.
  • Fixed issues with output to IPDS Printers that do not support FS45.
  • Fixed issues with imported PDF graphics that were inverted in IPDS output.
  • Conversion of certain FS10 G4 encoded images in IPDS output was causing Xerox 495 Printers to crash. This printer specific issue has now been fixed.
  • In IPDS and AFPDS output lines and boxes would be drawn using "Graphics Object Content Architecture" (GOCA) processing, rather than the more efficient Write Text (WT) processing. This has now been fixed, and the more efficient process is now used.
  • New PrinterDef designed for Nipson 7000 IPDS printer, which does not support Extended OVL.
  • When converting a PDF in IPDS processing, if the final item could not be converted it was lost. This has now been fixed.

Known Issues

Installation Paths with Multi-Byte Characters

When installing the Traditional Chinese or Japanese versions of Connect, if the user specifies an alternative installation path containing multi-byte/wide-char characters it can break some of the links to the Connect-related shortcuts in the Start Menu and cause an error to appear at the end of the installer. The workaround for the moment is to use the default installation path. The problem will be addressed in a later release.

Switching Languages

Changing the language using the Window>Preferences>Language Setting menu option does not currently change all of the strings in the application to the selected language. This is a known issue and will be fixed in a later release.

In the meantime we offer the following workaround for anyone who needs to change the language:

  1. Go to the .ini files for the Designer and Server Config:
    • C:\Program Files\Objectif Lune\OL Connect\Connect Designer\Designer.ini
    • C:\Program Files\Objectif Lune\OL Connect\Connect Server Configuration\ServerConfig.ini
  2. Change the language parameter to the required one under Duser.language=en | es | de | fr | it | ja | pt | tw | zh

Only one of the above language tags should be selected. Once saved, Connect will appear in the selected language at next start-up.

GoDaddy Certificates

When installing Connect offline, dialogs allow installing the GoDaddy certificates. Most users should use the default settings and click Next. In some cases, however, this may not work correctly. For this reason those users should activate Place all certificates in the following store and then select the Trusted Root Certification Authorities as the target certificate store.

Available Printer Models

Note that only the single Printer Model (Generic PDF) will appear on the Advanced page of the Print Wizard by default.
To add additional printer models click on the settings button next to the Model selection entry box.

Colour Model in Stylesheets

The colour model of colours defined in a stylesheet can sometimes change after editing the stylesheet. This is a known issue and will be addressed in a subsequent release.

Online Help Links Point to Introductory Page

Context sensitivity for the online help is not yet enabled in Connect. All links and F1 calls point to the introductory page, where you can Search on keywords to bring up Help pages relating to the topic.

Context sensitivity will be introduced in a subsequent release of Connect.

Image Preview in Designer

If in the Windows Internet settings (Connection Settings > LAN configuration) a proxy is enabled, but "Bypass proxy settings for local addresses" is not checked, the image preview service, conversion service and live preview tab in the Designer will not work and exhibit the following issues:

  • Images will be shows as 0 size boxes (no red 'X' is displayed)
  • Live preview does not progress, and when re-activated reports "browsers is busy"

To fix the issue you must check the "Bypass proxy settings for local addresses" option.

VIPP Output

Some templates set up with landscape orientation are being produced as portrait in VIPP. It can also sometimes be the case that text and images can be slightly displaced. These are known issues and will be addressed in a later release of Connect.