round-up: versions 15.0.2 - 15.1.2

Layout-8000 versions 15.0.2 - 15.1.2
8/14/2015 - 10/21/2015

Highlights:

• Redesigned the email address book.
• Refined version 15's new Products page.
• Improved automatic placement of color ads, ads that exclude a group, and ads that request a segmented group.
• On Mirrored servers, mkprime or mksec automatically run after a server reboot if conditions are right.
• Improved interfaces to CCI and Hermes editorial systems.

Select Product

• Added a User Preference that allows you to specify how many days worth of products you want to see in the product list.  The default is 30 days.  This is in response to someone who prefers to see only one day's worth of papers at a time. The field for specifying this preference is on the user preference dialog tab that is labeled Product Page.  When the user changes their number of days preference, the product list is immediately repainted to show that number of days.  As before, the Change Product List button can be used to change the start date.
• Added a toolbar.
  The toolbar has eight buttons.
• Four of the buttons are like the next/previous page/screen navigation buttons in the Design & Dummy area.  They change the start date in the product list by moving forward or backward one day or one page, where a page is the number of days in the user's preference for the number of days to show in the product list.
• The other four buttons are for adding/removing days of products to show in the product list.  Two buttons add/remove one day; the other two add/remove one page, where a page is the number of days in the user's preference for the number of days to show in the list.
• Fixed bugs in the "New Session for Product" button. At the start of a Layout session, an error message indicated that mProductListNumberOfDays was uninitialized. The product was successfully created and selected, but in the same session instead of a new session. Both bugs are fixed.
• An error message about input variable MenuLang no longer pops up.
• Version 15's new Products page has been translated to Spanish.

Get Ads

• The Mactive/ALS Product Maps show editions for the correct paper.
• Improved support for file names that contain periods, for example "trans.12345".
• The "Interface Tool" was added to a list of site-specific menu entries. An administrator may indicate if people use the Interface Tool through "Manage Custom Entries."

Design & Dummy area

• Ad image files with an uppercase ".PDF" or lowercase ".pdf" extension are accepted.
• Two actions allow you to arrange ads on a page to fit the page's dummying style. They are "Redummy" and "Reshape". Both actions are available on the pop-up menu for a page. The "Reshape" feature is new. Read the attached document to learn more about these features.
• Improved automatic placement of color ads.
• Improved automatic placement of ads that exclude a group.
• Improved automatic placement of ads that request a segmented group.
• If an ad has one color and that color is the "black & white" color, then the Dummy and Redummy commands treat the ad as a non-color ad.
• The "Review undummied items" feature has moved from the toolbar to the Advertising menu to make room for the new "Reshape" button.
• In the "Modify Ad" menu that appears when the user presses the "More details" button in the Ad tab of the ILP info dialog, the user can now see and change the page request. Previously, the user could change the group or section request but could not specify or change a page request.
• The ad list's "Request" column shows a correct range of pages when an ad requests pages in the middle of a scope, e.g. when an ad requests the middle 4 pages of a section.
• Suppose that an ad requests section J which is unused and has no pages. Section J appears in the ad list's "Request" column. Section J now also appears in the Ad tab's "Request" column to be consistent. If that ad was placed on a page (in a different section), the Ad tab will indicate a Section request conflict.
• Added Ad Demand and Extended Assignment to the page style modifier dialog.
• Unused page messages are periodically removed from the database.
• The "Dummy" command and CLP program no longer update page messages.
• A list of block templates can be sorted by column.
• When blocks that use block templates are renamed, the block's new ID appears in the ad list. From there, the block can be acted upon as usual.
• Addressed a concern in the Available Space Calculator. When an ad is assigned to a page but not placed on that page, that ad no longer counts toward the Ad area. What you see is what you get. If you see an ad on a page, that counts toward the Ad area. If you see free space on a page, that counts toward the News area.
• Initialized a Page Depth variable that is used in a "stackdiff.log" file when a product has pages with invalid ad stacks.
• When running Zoned Page Setup to add a zone to a set of zones for a range of pages, some of the pages in that page range were mistakenly deleted from other zones. This bug is fixed.
• The global setting "Output XML upon leaving ILP" is now honored. Most sites will want to disable or uncheck this option unless there is a strong need for it, because (1) no one needs an XML file at that time, and (2) it takes time.

Email Address Book

• Renovated the email address book. The new GUI is cleaner, simpler and easier to use.
• Addressed a scrolling issue.
• There is a small change to the user interface for the "To" field. If the user types in the "To" field and exits the field, the dialog checks to see if the field has just one address or part of an address (i.e. no commas).  If so, it checks to see if what the user has typed partially matches any email addresses in the address book. If so, it presents a list of email addresses that partially match.  The user can choose one of these or decline to do so.  If the user chooses one, it replaces what the user typed into the "To" field; otherwise it leaves the "To" field as-is.
• Email address book data is better imported from old versions of Layout-8000.
• Multiple versions of Layout-8000 can use the same email address book.

Send to Pagination

• Corrected <SpreadPage> values in CCI XML files. In one case, a double truck ad had ID 20506582, and a non-double-truck ad had ID 205065821. The IDs are nearly the same. That caused a page to be incorrectly marked as double truck in an XML file that Layout-8000 sent to CCI.
• If someone tries to use the "CCI XML interface" before it is set up, a message pops up explaining that. Uninitialized variable error messages no longer appear.
• When a product is associated with a Page Type, Layout-8000 will populate page margins and other new page measurements in the <parameters> section of SCS extended product XML files. These measurements are used by a custom interface to a Hermes editorial system.
• The "Remove unplaced ads and blocks" command has become more configurable. It can remove unplaced ads WITHOUT removing unplaced blocks. This benefits sites that assign editorial blocks to pages for CCI page IDs.
• The "Making custom file" command reports an error when the custom Formula fails to be executed. The error message appears on the terminal that "rlws" was launched from. This helped SCS track down a configuration error.

High Availability (HA)

• On Mirrored servers, mkprime or mksec automatically runs during system startup if conditions are right.
• Reorganized "mirror.conf" on new servers so that commonly changed variables are near the top, related variables are grouped together, and there is a comment explaining each variable. All of the code that doesn't involve variables that the user can set is at the bottom.
• Corrected permissions on a folder that SCS Mirroring uses to replicate data for ads.

Screen Shots: