Layout-8000 15.7.3 (February 10, 2017)

Layout-8000 v15.7.3
2/10/2017

Get Ads

• When a user runs "Get Ads", options to “Print Adtaker´s Update Reports” and “Print Credit Exception Report" will appear only if "Get Ads" was configured to "Update transaction file into dbase."
• "intolayout.sh" better handles input directories that are symbolic links to a mounted filesystem.

Ad Order Entry

• The toolbar has two buttons to create an ad. One button opens the quick/short form. The other button opens the Long form. Lee Enterprises plans to use the long form to enter standby ads.
• Global Layout Settings has a new "Ad Entry" tab. There you can define which form appears when a user presses the Insert key in our Ad Order Entry system.
• Corrected a field name in an error message. The "Advertiser" or "Advertiser Name" field is required. The error message mistakenly referred to that field as "Account Name" which caused confusion. The message was corrected.
• On the long ad order form, when a user enters the Type field, Layout-8000 no longer hangs.
• On the long ad order form, when a user enters the Category field, a "table row subscript out of range" error message no longer appears.

StandbyAdBoss

• When a user enters the Design & Dummy area and Layout-8000 checks for "cardex differences", it no longer complains about standby ads that are not in the new cardex file. The option to kill the standby ad also goes away, because that is certainly not what the user had wanted.
• When a user enters the Design & Dummy area, an "uninitialized variable - ItemNumberFx" error no longer appears.

Ad Images

• Layout-8000 allows site-specific ad image paths.

Design & Dummy area

• Getting into Design & Dummy.
  
  From the main Layout Workstation window, there are now three ways to get into Design & Dummy after a product has been selected.
1. Click on the Design & Dummy button, as before.
2. Press Enter with the product list cursor on the selected product.
3. Double-click on the selected product in the product list.
   Note that if you have a selected product and double-click or press Enter with the cursor on some other product in the product list, that product becomes the selected product.  But if you double-click or press Enter on the product that is already selected, Layout enters Design & Dummy.
   
   
• If you right-click on a group bar, a menu pops up. The menu offers several actions that can be performed on a group. For example, a user can lock pages and ads in the group, which facilitates targeted dummying.
  
  
• The "check cardex" process more correctly checks whether it should run "Ad Extract" for the current site and product.
  
  
• The "Unplace Inner Scope Items" button has improved as follows.
  
  The user clicks this toolbar button to remove unlocked items that are on the unlocked pages of the current inner scope.  The behavior of this action has been to remove the items from their pages but leave them assigned to those pages.
  
  That behavior is not always desirable.  For example, suppose the user adds a page to a group.  He may want to remove all ads from their pages in order to redummy them in light of the the new, larger group. Since the ads are still assigned to the pages that they were removed from, redummying just puts them back onto those same pages instead of taking advantage of the new page that was added to the group.
  
  Now when the user clicks the "Unplace Inner Scope Items" button, a dialog appears.  The dialog gives the user some options for assigning the removed items.  If the inner scope is a group or section, the options are:
      Leave the removed ads assigned to their pages.
  
      Unassign the removed ads to the paper scope.
  
      Assign removed ads that appear green in the ad list to the inner
      scope and all other removed ads to the paper scope.
  
      Assign removed ads that appear green or black in the ad list to
      the inner scope and all other removed ads to the paper scope.
  
  If the inner scope is the paper or a page, the dialog shows only the first two options:  leave the removed ads assigned to their pages or unassign the removed ads to the paper scope.?
  
  
  Note that this applies only to ads whose color and group request are both degradable, a rare combination.  If only color is degradable, the ad must be placed in the group.  If only the group request is
  degradable, the ad must be placed on a color page.
  
  
• Options for non-color ads.
  
  On the global layout settings auto-dummy tab, there are now four options for non-color ads.  Three of the options are the same as before.  Non-color ads can be restricted to non-color pages, or they can be restricted to non-color or spot-color pages, or they can go on any page.
  
  For the second option, Layout first tries to find a non-color page; if it can't, it tries to find a spot-color page.  For the third option, it looks for a non-color page, then a spot-color page, then a full-color page.
  
  The fourth option is similar to the third option in that it allows a non-color ad to go any any page.  The difference is that with the fourth option, Layout doesn't prefer a non-color page or spot-color page before settling on a full-color page.  Thus if the best page for a non-color ad is a full-color page, it is placed on that page even if it could have been placed on a non-color page.
  
  One site where the fourth option is useful is the Merchandiser.  Their goal is to distribute ads across pages as evenly as possible.  Suppose a group has three pages of which two are color.  With the other options, all of the non-color ads that request that group (and that fit) will go onto the single non-color page in the group, even if that fills up the non-color page with ads and leaves a lot of extra space for ads on the two full-color pages.  With the fourth option, the ads are distributed more evenly across the pages of the group.
  
  
• Better handling of color ads with group requests.
  
  The behavior of the dummying algorithm for color ads has been to place color ads before non-color ads.  In general, that makes sense, since a paper is likely to have fewer pages available for a color ad than for a non-color ad.
  
  Here is an actual case where it would have been better not to always place a color ad before a non-color ad.  With the non-color ad setting allowing non-color ads on color pages, there was a twelve-page group that had nine color pages.  Within the twelve-page group was a smaller two-page group.  When Layout placed the color ads first, it placed some of them on pages in the two-page group when there was enough space elsewhere among the seven other color pages in the twelve-page group.  The result was that the two-page group's pages became so full of color ads that there was not enough room for all of the non-color ads that requested the two-page group.
  
  The new behavior is to put ads in order for placement according to how many pages are available in the request; that is, ads that have fewer pages in their request are placed first.  The computation of the number of pages in the request considers both color and scope/page requests. Thus a color ad that requests a group with nine color pages has nine pages available; a non-color ad that requests a group with two pages has two pages available.
  
  In the above example, the non-color ads are now placed into the two-page group first.  Since the larger group has nine color pages, there is still space on those nine pages for the color ads that request the larger group.
  
  
• Better handling of color degradation vs. group degradation.
  
  If an ad has a degradable color request and a degradable group request and Layout can't find a color page in the group for the ad, it first degrades the group (looks for a color page outside the group), before
  it degrades the color (looks for a non-color page in the group).  The last resort is to find a non-color page outside the group.
  
  Previously, Layout degraded the color request first, then the group request.  The new behavior is based on the assumption that it if there is no color page in the group for the ad, it is better to place it on
  a color page outside the group than on a non-color page in the group.
  
  
• When an ad that requests spot colors is placed on a full color page, Layout-8000 no longer reports that as a color conflict, because the advertiser got every color that they requested.
• After someone changes the order of sections, Layout-8000 updates groups that use section-relative page numbers, to ensure that those groups remain within the section.

Reports

• When page dummies (PGL) generate an XML file for a product, the background window's title has changed from "Send XML to Pagination" to "Generating XML for Page Dummies".
• Fixed a rare bug that appeared when pages were removed from a newspaper. In this case, someone moved ads and blocks off of pages A-9 to A-12, removed pages A-9 to A-12, then created page dummies (PGL). A message popped up complaining that offset 10 was out of the range of section A, because that section now has 8 pages.

Send to Pagination

• If the "Send to Pagination" process fails to copy a file, then (1) a message pops up on the Layout-8000 user's screen, and (2) we may also email an alert. Alerts can be configured in Global Layout Settings.
• Fixed a bug in the interface to Shoom eTearsheets systems that resulted in XML files with 0 ads.

Export Procedures

• Layout-8000 now provides a way for users to specify which products use an export procedure.  When a user decides to run an export procedure, only those procedures that are specified as used by that product appear in the list of procedures that the user can choose from.

SQLAdBoss

• Redesigned a process that populates our SQL database to prevent hard stops, because that required babysitting.