Hello everyone, I have a question concerning the export to PDF. When I do the export of my tropy list including the images, many (not all) of them appear as black boxes. This seems to happen randomly, as it sometimes occurs to a selected data set, but not when exporting the entire list and vice versa. I would be happy if you could help me. Thank you!!
It sounds like this could be an error where individual images are not loaded (or are not loaded in time) during the export process. Can you tell us what operating system version you’re using? The print/pdf stacks work differently on each platform.
If you notice additional details it could help us figure this out. For example, if it the same photo always fails, I would guess that there’s an issue loading that specific photo. If it happens randomly, as you say above, and given photo sometimes works and sometimes does not I would guess that it’s a timing issue. A timing issue should be more likely to happen if you’re exporting a larger set; less so if exporting a smaller set or even just a single photo.
If it’s down to timing, there is currently an arbitrary timeout (two seconds) – if all images have not reported as being loaded the PDF conversion will continue. It’s possible that this is just too short in your case. Again, this is more likely to happen if you export lots of photos together or if the photos are very big, but maybe we just allow for a little more time there.
If the images are big it would also help to make sure you have the option ‘Optimize photo size and quality’ enabled in the preferences.
Tropy is amazing. But it would really be necessary to develop the PDF export options: possibility to export several images per page; no more bugs when exporting a PDF, etc. Is there any progress on this point?
What kind of printing modes with several images per page would you like to see? Do you mean something like one item per page, with all photos in the item being shown (if possible). Which metadata, if any, would would you want to see on the page?
We have always planned to include some kind of item/per page mode but we have not seen good use cases yet to help us figure out exactly what this should entail.
Of course the other way to get multiple photos on the same page is via the OS-level print dialog, which should also allow you to save as PDF.
For example, for my research, I’d need to export PDFs from Tropy with 4 images per page, and all the metadata. Ideally, I’d like to be able to choose how many images per sheet I want when exporting in Pdf format (and that the text remains sufficiently legible). But I don’t know how complicated that is.
This would be very useful for historians to show a selection of images simply, and reduce the number of pages of the Pdf.
When you say four images per page, including all metadata for each image, how is that different from using the current layout and selecting four pages per sheet in the print dialog?
the text becomes illegible.